Body - Side Mirrors

I purchased some side mirrors from Squeak Bell via Trademe. Squeak used to own Kiwi Konnection in the US. They build Hot Rod chassis and some of them make their way back here to NZ. As it turns out Squeak had a few parts left over from a build he'd done for a customer and these bits were things that the customer had changed their mind on. Changing your mind like that is one of those things that happens all the time on a hot rod build, but if you can avoid it by having a good plan it really does pay off. Every time you change your mind you shell out more cash and you lose a lot when you go to try and on sell the unused bits.

These mirrors are a classic case. They retail for about $146 US so that is the best part of $200 in Kiwi cash. I picked them up for about a quarter of that. My gain this time I guess....but I'm sure my turn will come when I am the one on the losing end.

Anyway as many of you know, to say I like my gadgets is a bit of an understatement and in case you haven't already guessed from my blogs about the climate aircon......I intend to have a few mod cons on this rod.

So I decided the mirrors will be electric.

I have been scavenging at Pick a Part to try and find some nice small motors that will fit into these new side mirrors. The glass is only just over 2 inches tall at the widest point so they are fairly small and finding a motor that will fit inside this space has proven to be a real big ask.

I must have popped the glass out more than fifty different side mirrors before I came across something small enough.

In the end these mirrors from a Ford Focus have become the donors.

Now we are about to find out how an electric mirror works. I bet you have been laying awake at nights just wondering how they move in all directions at the touch of a button.

First I pop the mirror out.

As you can see it is just glued to a plastic backing and that plastic backing clips into a ring around the electric mirror motor. That's the motor you can see in the second picture above.

Here it is pulled out of the housing. It is held in place by 3 screws.

The white strip going across diagonally is the pivot and the black things either side are the motors. At the end of each motor is a white plastic stem. You can see a closer pic of one of these below.

The stem has small teeth and the motor has a cog on the end of it, so when the motor turns over it pushes this stem out or pulls it in depending on which direction it is turning.

The stem itself is connected to the outer plastic ring around the motors so it pushes and pulls the ring in and out.

Because the white plastic pivot bar runs diagonally between these two motors and stems it means the push pull action of the upper motor pivots the ring left and right.

The bottom motor pushes and pulls to pivot the ring up and down. Both motors can operate to get all the various positions in between. Easy as that.

There are 3 wires coming out of the 2 motors. The blue wire is common to both motors and the yellow belongs to the top (left/right motor) while the orange belongs to the bottom (up/down) motor.

When a power supply goes onto the yellow wire and the blue wire is earthed the top motor cranks outwards.

When polarity is reversed (power to the blue wire and earthed yellow wire) the motor cranks back in again. The same thing applies to the orange wire for the bottom motor.

So when you push your power mirror buttons that is in effect what you are doing and what is going on in side that side mirror.


Now you may also have noticed in an earlier picture when I popped the mirror out that there were some wires hanging out of the glass. These are a bit of a bonus.....they belong to the heaters inside the mirrors......heh, heh, I'm like a pig in shit now......not only will the mirrors be electric they will be heated too. This is an absolutely critical piece of technology as I will need these when I get the car on the road and go on the snow run at Ruapehu. These little heaters will thaw the mirrors so I have good visibility even at below zero degree conditions.

 Okay so how do the heaters work?

First you have to get the glass out. No mean feat as it is bloody near superglued in place. Breaking it away bit by bit required a bit of care and I decided to wear me safetys! Not just because I look so damn good in them, but also because bits fly everywhere.

If there is one thing I learned when I built my last rod.......it is......."if you think something could go wrong here and I shouldn't really be doing this".......then don't as sure as hell, it will go wrong. Just ask me about the angle grinder and my jandal's one day.

Anyway once the glass is peeled away, this is what you see. A small thin sheet of plastic that incorporates the heater element.

Flip that over and peel away the other side of the sticky stuff and you can see the heater element.

Each wire goes to a metal filament that winds its way across the plastic sheet (bit like a kids...."Help Bugs Bunny find his way to the carrots"......puzzle). Neither of these filaments actually touch at any point but the black material between does conduct power between the two circuits but with some resistance. It is this resistance that generates heat. Voila heated mirrors.

Now the interesting point is that because the the silver circuits don't actually meet anywhere I can effectively cut them off and the heater will still work. I just need to be sure to cut the pad to length by cutting vertically rather than cutting horizontally across the heater pad.

So its not a perfect fit but it will heat the centre of the mirror and the heat will transmit through the glass over time as well. You can see in the second pic roughly how the pad will sit. This pad will be for the drivers side though so the black side will face toward us and the silver circuits and wires will go in behind.

In the pic below you can see how the mirrors come from the manufacturer. So how do we make all that electric stuff fit inside the small mirror body. First I'll pull out the manual pivoting face that comes with the mirrors. Normally you'd mount the glass on the pivoting face once the body has been painted to match the car, so they come with the mirrors not yet glued in.

Now that this is out we can see how much......actually how little space we have to work with.

Ooops kinda like a round peg in a square hole! No panic though, I carefully selected these motors with a view to cutting them down.....here's one I prepared earlier!

And now, screwed into place.

You will remember then that the original mirror had a plastic backing that clipped onto the motor. Then that had the heater pad stuck to it.....then the mirrors was stuck to that.

Fairly easy except I will glue mine in rather than clip them, I will use silicone so if ever a glass should break I should be able to ease it away with a bit of effort.

BUT!!!!!! One last improvement. You see these mirrors are so small you can't see much out of them, so I am going to put convex lenses in to give a better view.

The problem with that though is how do you stick a curved mirror on a flat mounting? Well as luck would have it the mounting pad that came with the mirrors is curved on its back face and wouldn't you know it, it fits perfectly (well with a bit of filing it does) to the shape of the new mirror lenses.

All I need to do now is get a glass expert to cut the glass to shape.

This is about as far as I can go for now with these as I can't assemble the mirrors until we can fit them to the body and can paint them to match the car. Then all the components get screwed and glued into place before wiring up to switches to operate them....but that is another story for another day!









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General - Response from TAC (Technical Advisory Committee)

Just this last week I had the official word from the TAC (Technical Advisory Committee).

Unfortunately the response to my application to be able to run two body styles on the one chassis platform has been declined.

There were three main reasons;

1. A body style must be noted on the registration and on the certification documentation but there is no provision for noting two styles of body for either of these, i.e. the system does not cater for this.
2. There are a number of components that would be specific to each body such as door latches and hinges, glass, wipers, eye level brake light, other lights (tail lights and brake lights), seat belts and seat belt mounts, seats and seat mounts. These all form part of checks formed as part of the cert process and of the Warrant of Fitness process. Obviously if one warrant is obtained then these components would not have been checked on the other body for condition, specification and safety. In addition to this there are two key elements, the steering column and the brake pedal that would be affected when the body changed over and these needed to be safe but there is no provision for a check to occur of these components after changing the body.
3. Last but not least it sets a really ugly precedence that could be interpreted with more radical changes by others if this one were allowed.

I totally get it and as you know from my last blog I was kind of thinking the same thing. The only thing that could change it for me would be if mass produced cars started coming out with such an option, which could happen. I have heard that Smart Cars are looking at a body that can be switched between coupe, sedan and ute.  If these existed now in NZ, I would possibly have had a better case.

So in short, the coupe it is! That burning desire to have a Tudor as well will just have to go on hold for a while. That said its nice to be able to progress without having to worry about making things fit for a changing body style. A whole lot easier!

General - Big change but still on track

There has been a lot happening since I last posted and its fair to say I have put off posting until I had made a few decisions and had a few answers I could share with you.

You will recall that the original intent was to build a Tudor (a sedan shaped car but with 2 doors - hence the play on words - Two Door / Tudor). The plan was that it would look something like this. 

 In fact the blog was even called Flaming Tudor. You may also recall though that the idea was to make the the body removable so I could interchange it with a Coupe body as well. I still haven't heard if I'm going to be allowed to do that or not but the more I think about it, I doubt the idea will fly......and that got me thinking......you see I have always wanted to have another Coupe and the Tudor was kind of an added bonus. If I can't do the two body thing then what would I really prefer? I have to say it is a Coupe.

The Coupe was always going to be a fenderless version and my original thinking was build the Tudor, that will be the harder car to build as there is more to it and that way the change to a fenderless Coupe should be a relatively easy one. I was wrong though, there is more to building the fenderless car as more is exposed and on view. You can hide a multitude of sins with those guards and running boards.

So the big change is.........the Coupe will come first!

The other big decision I have had to make is whether or not to redo the whole front end of the chassis that Juniors Kustom Rides have just finished installing. Why would I want to do that you ask??? 

Well I had never given it a lot of thought but I have found out since that work was done, that when you build a fenderless hot rod the front chassis rails stick out like this car below. You can see the ends of the chassis rails protruding with the headlights mounted to them.

This is okay on a traditional looking rod but on a more modern looking rod like I envisage you'd normally do what they call pinching the chassis. In effect it is bringing the rails closer together at the front and as a result having them line up with and hidden by the bonnet. The end result is they are hidden and don't stick out, so you get a cleaner look like this.

Does it look cleaner? Yes.....

Does it look better? Hmmmm dunno.

Does it look okay not pinched? Yeah I think it does.

Is it worth redoing the whole front end again at great expense? This is the most difficult one to answer. This is because if I want to do this it is never going to be easier or cheaper than doing it right now.

So how do you decide? I decided to mock up a picture of the car and to draw in the protruding chassis rails to see what it will look like. So that's exactly what I have now done.... now you can consider yourselves very lucky......in fact.......the privileged few. You are the first to see this mocked up drawing of what the car will look like. 

Do the protruding chassis rails look okay? Yeah I reckon they do especially if I mount the headlights on them. Let me know what you think.

A lot of work to get to this from a standard 33 Ford Coupe. It is significantly chopped which means height is taken from the pillars that support the roof. In this case more height has been taken from the front pillars than the rear ones, so you get that real "raked" look. Also if you compare it to the picture of the original car below you can see that the windscreen has been angled back to give it a more modern stance.

In addition to "raking" the top of the car I will also be exaggerating the rake by angling the body itself. This is achieved by lifting the floor of the car upwards so that the chassis tucks further up under the body. This is known as channeling. Again more in the front than the back, which will angle the body forward.

All this Chopping and Channeling has an impact though as the roof is lower and the floor is higher in the car. Guess what that does for head room.... yep you guessed it.... not much. The seats will be damn near set on the floor. Can you imagine that though.... a 300hp V8 bolted to a chassis that carries a wee bit of fibreglass and its occupants who are sitting on the floor. It should be like riding in a go kart. I can't wait!!!!!

Anyway compare it to the picture of a standard 3 window coupe. Pretty radical change huh! Traditionalists will hate this, but i have the philosophy that a hot rod should be what the owner wants it to be and this is what I like the look of. If you don't like it go and build your own one!