Tim had brought up the Oct event but I had already made plans. Sucks because I have the time off and it would have been cool to see AMP. Guess I wait again.
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Tim had brought up the Oct event but I had already made plans. Sucks because I have the time off and it would have been cool to see AMP. Guess I wait again.
And the Jzilla staff took out some guests during lunch. Of course we got a little spicy near the end.
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We let the van stay out front. Pro driver behind the wheel, by lap 2 all I could smell was it’s brakes.
Rolling into T1 at Road Atlanta.
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I dodged a couple of bullets today with the hardtop. I needed to loosen and remove the front latches to refurbish/repair them and the screws holding them in were loctite’d in and the heads were a bit fubar’d.
With softtop now on the car, I could address these shitty screws that had cost me a LOT to have removed on my NA way back when.
Back in ‘08 I had the hard top on my NA painted to match the car. Living in SOCAL, hard tops are a big theft item and I wanted to switch to mounting plates to deter this. Of course, because the factory uses red loctite, mine became mangled when I tried to remove them. I also didn’t know about JIS sizing for the screws. I wound up using a specialty shop and it cost me $400-600 to have the snapped screws removed without damaging the fresh paint. Lesson learned.
Fast forward to today, I am going to refurbish and paint my current top to match the car. It has also needed a better alignment of the latches to fit better. I took this opportunity to try to remove these screws before I used my fallback position of welding nuts to the screws to remove them.
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I laid the top on some saw horses and laid out my tools: a propane torch for sweating pipes, a scrap piece of heat shielding to protect the surrounding area I applied heat to, some water in case things got a little spicy with the fire, and the coup de grâce...Rev Limiter JIS screw driver bits.
I laid the torch to the heads of the screws, working one at a time. I butted the shielding next to area to prevent damage (re: setting the top on fire).
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I applied a conservative amount of heat on the first couple of screws and they started backing out, but the loctite cooled and hardened before I could get them out.
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I used the proper JIS bit in a magnetic bit holder for a drill, but instead of a drill, I used a 1/4” ratcheting wrench and a 1/4” socket to turn the bit and bit holder. This method works WAAAAAAAAY better than trying to do this with top on the car. I was able to use better visibility and room to keep the JIS bit seated in the mangled screw head and work steadily and swiftly while the loctite was still soft from the heat.
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I started getting a feel for how much heat to use and how to keep working at an even pace. Soon they were out!
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The JIS bits from Adam are worth the money.
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I replaced the screws with 6x1.0 10mm screws that I had left over from an engine tear down. I am certain these were holding the oil pan on an engine in their former life. I chased their threads, brushed the heads, cleaned them.
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I also brushed the latches, cleaned them too. I prepped them for paint.
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While the paint dried, I chased out the holes the screws were in to remove any leftover loctite.
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I also plumped the seal that runs under the hardtop around the rear because I had been getting wind noise here on the driver side.
Once the paint was dry enough to handle, I reinstalled the latches.
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So, thinking on what I had done with the hard top latches, I started thinking about the locks and plastic nubs. I was looking at the billet lock replacements and nubs, they are $65/pair for the locks, about $10 for the nubs. The hard top latches are good, the soft top latches...woof.
I’ve only had this soft top a week, the top is excellent, but the donor car must have lived near the coast. The latches don’t lock well and the nubs are non-existent. Then I remembered about some side latches I had in storage from my NA I took off years ago. I was pretty sure they were in minty-fresh condition. I wondered if I could take them apart and transfer over the latch mechanisms to my crusty soft top latches? I don’t think I have ever heard of this being done, so went back out to the garage, cued up my 90s hip hop playlist and located the side latches in my storage totes. Let’s see how this goes...
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My new (to me) corroded soft top latches looked pretty bad.
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Here’s how the front and side latches look side by side:
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The latches basically use the same parts, just different platforms because of how they mount to their intended surfaces. I started stripping down the latch internals and swapped the nice, clean side latch internals to the front latch platform.
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A lot of little parts, but not too bad if you just keep them organized. The new/rebuilt latches work and look sooo well!
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One of these days, I need to fix mine. They haven't locked completely in years.
Oh, I bought the nubs. That part's fine. The latches are too worn on mine. At this point, I'd need to put in a self-tapping screw on the latch button itself.
I had one side latch left, for some reason I have 3 or 4 of them. The passenger side latch on the hardtop has a squiffy lock, so I disassembled them to swap them around. I looked closely at the lock, the latch handle(?) on both and they looked the same barely any discernible wear. Still the swapped over guts locked the squiffy latch so that’s a win.
Took a page from Anthony and strung up a hard top hoist today.
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