70_Fastback
Hell Bent for Speed
I have been wanting to add some gas struts to my deck lid for quite a while now, but always seemed to "forget" to do it. Until I showed up at a car show and had to prop the deck lid open with a wooden dowl... can you say W.T. ?
If you look real hard here, you can see the wooden dowl on the driver side, rear deck lid hinge bracket. The dowl contours the curve of the bracket. Pretty classy ahe?
Better shot of it here:
Now if that doesn't dock you some points, I don't know what will. :headac
So I had a free day, and with the impending Basehor Car show coming up this weekend, and faced with having fellow VMF'rs & StangFix'rs there, I wanted to get this done to reduce the outward W.T. appearance.
So I headed off to O'reilly Auto to buy some universal gas struts. Not much luck. Everyone they have is like 100lbs rated. I could hardly push one cylinder in. It would be way too much force for the rear deck lid.
Head of to Napa. Napa had a couple of 20lb struts in stock, but they were WAY too long for what I wanted. I decide to head over to my local salvage yard and do a junkyard crawl to find what I want. After about 2 hours of climbing through wrecks, I leave with 2 different pair of struts. Cost me all a whopping $12 bucks. The brackets somehow found their way into my pockets though. Slippery lil' boogers they were... :naug.
I wish I would have payed better attention to what these shorter struts came off of. It was a Chrysler mid-size car if I remember correct.
Both ends where set up for the ball press on fit - with different sizes on each end. I ended up just drilling out the smaller end to run a bolt through (see later pics).
I snagged these brackets from something else. I honestly don't remember what it was. I know it was not an Explorer because they were all riveted on.
I started by mocking everything up first. Clamped everything where I thought it should initialy go. Checked geometry, travel distance and made sure the struts had enough pressure to hold the deck lid open, but not fling it up when the latch was unlocked. Everything seemed to work fine on the initial locations. So I marked holes and started drilling.
I began by locating the bottom brackets using one existing hole to help set exact alignment for both sides and drilled the remaining bottom hole. Bolted brackets in place.
Next up was the hinge bracket itself. I did snag a couple of screw in ball-studs to attach the opposite end of the strut too. But it was going to be impossible to drill and tap the holes on the outside face of the arm, next to the mounting plate. I would of had to remove the entire hinge assembly from the car and have to realign the deck lid, etc, etc. Didn't want to do that. So I drilled through the entire arm and ran a bolt from the inside to the out. This comes back to the earlier deal of drilling out the ball fitting end on the strut to facilitate a bolt installation though it.
Both ends connected and secured in place (I added the "Russel" stickers to purty'em up a bit :nice:
They support the deck lid perfectly with out forcing the deck lid up. Closing it is a breeze as well. Once you get past mid travel of the strut, the deck lid falls shut as it did before without any additional force to close it.
So in closing....
Before:
After:
If you look real hard here, you can see the wooden dowl on the driver side, rear deck lid hinge bracket. The dowl contours the curve of the bracket. Pretty classy ahe?
Better shot of it here:
Now if that doesn't dock you some points, I don't know what will. :headac
So I had a free day, and with the impending Basehor Car show coming up this weekend, and faced with having fellow VMF'rs & StangFix'rs there, I wanted to get this done to reduce the outward W.T. appearance.
So I headed off to O'reilly Auto to buy some universal gas struts. Not much luck. Everyone they have is like 100lbs rated. I could hardly push one cylinder in. It would be way too much force for the rear deck lid.
Head of to Napa. Napa had a couple of 20lb struts in stock, but they were WAY too long for what I wanted. I decide to head over to my local salvage yard and do a junkyard crawl to find what I want. After about 2 hours of climbing through wrecks, I leave with 2 different pair of struts. Cost me all a whopping $12 bucks. The brackets somehow found their way into my pockets though. Slippery lil' boogers they were... :naug.
I wish I would have payed better attention to what these shorter struts came off of. It was a Chrysler mid-size car if I remember correct.
Both ends where set up for the ball press on fit - with different sizes on each end. I ended up just drilling out the smaller end to run a bolt through (see later pics).
I snagged these brackets from something else. I honestly don't remember what it was. I know it was not an Explorer because they were all riveted on.
I started by mocking everything up first. Clamped everything where I thought it should initialy go. Checked geometry, travel distance and made sure the struts had enough pressure to hold the deck lid open, but not fling it up when the latch was unlocked. Everything seemed to work fine on the initial locations. So I marked holes and started drilling.
I began by locating the bottom brackets using one existing hole to help set exact alignment for both sides and drilled the remaining bottom hole. Bolted brackets in place.
Next up was the hinge bracket itself. I did snag a couple of screw in ball-studs to attach the opposite end of the strut too. But it was going to be impossible to drill and tap the holes on the outside face of the arm, next to the mounting plate. I would of had to remove the entire hinge assembly from the car and have to realign the deck lid, etc, etc. Didn't want to do that. So I drilled through the entire arm and ran a bolt from the inside to the out. This comes back to the earlier deal of drilling out the ball fitting end on the strut to facilitate a bolt installation though it.
Both ends connected and secured in place (I added the "Russel" stickers to purty'em up a bit :nice:
They support the deck lid perfectly with out forcing the deck lid up. Closing it is a breeze as well. Once you get past mid travel of the strut, the deck lid falls shut as it did before without any additional force to close it.
So in closing....
Before:
After:
Last edited by a moderator:
