Here is picture of installed Tee-nuts as seen from the inside of the windshield:

I may not even use the solid sunroof section and instead may make one out of acrylic (I have an entire sheet!) but there is not a lot of work involved so will finish up the solid one. At a later date when I have nothing else better to do then I will make the acrylic insert and install it.

Back to the frame work also used bondo to create fillet around all edges and sanded. I then used one layer of 6oz cloth on all roof/door frames being sure to have all wood joints covered with cloth. Applying the cloth is tough as gravity is working against you, you have to keep on applying the cloth and pushing it into all areas to be sure to get a good contact with the wood. Work on a single area and be sure to make the resin mix hot so that it goes off faster.

Alex Smith had decided to sell his Vortex and Dustin Stern (a member of the Vortex discussion group) purchased it. I had talked to Dustin a number of times prior and offered to help him with any modifications that he wanted, as Dustin currently does not have welding skills/tools.

In addition since Dustin was soon going to be moving from one place to another I offered to give the Vortex a temporary home at my place here in WV. Who in their right mind would not! It gives me the opportunity to actually go out and see some of the details of how Alex built his vehicle! It will probably be at my place for a couple of months while work progresses.

Alex is a great guy and I wish that we had more time to spend talking with him, but hopefully we can in the future.

The trailering went well without incident with one small exception, when I put on one of the binders onto the rear axle I inadvertently caught the bearing seal, very minor damage but will have to be replaced before Dustin puts the Vortex into service.

Here are a couple of pictures that Alex took:

The result is that compared to Alex's, mine looks like a 'chubby' Vortex. With the fact that I increased the height by almost 6" throws it out of proportions from the low and sleek look of the original design. It helps that I stretched out the front but I also need to stretch out the back by about 5" as well to make it look more balanced.

I am not complaining though as I saw Dustin (who is 5' 7") struggle to get into Alex's Vortex, partially due to the fact that there is not a tilt steering wheel. With Dustin in the vehicle I saw about 3" of headroom. I also was able to get into the vehicle (seemingly easier than Dustin due to my years of squirt boating...) and once in I had between 1/2" - 1" of headroom (depending where you measured it from), however my right leg was over the top of the shifter - due to the lack of tilt steering. With my neck being fused the angle that it put my head in quickly aggravated my neck, this pretty much confirmed my initial thoughts when I dummied up the seat profile in my living room before I began the project.

When I sit in my Vortex in the after-market seats that I bought (without sliders) right now I have 3" of head room. In addition the extended tilt of the steering wheel makes it VERY easy for me to get into and out of my Vortex in spite of my fused neck, so even if you are building a Vortex to spec I would HIGHLY recommend the tilt steering wheel!

In studying the front trunk hinge per plan set it seemed extremely important that the pivit point for them be placed as far forward and close to the top as possible otherwise the offset hinges will cause interference between the body and the trunk lid. In seeing that Alex had problems modified them so that they were double acting confirmed the fact. It just seemed easier to me to be able to purchase a set of automotive hinges and get them to work so, today I got onto eBay and found a set of VW Cabriolet rear trunk hinges that came off a 2002 model. They looked pretty much like what was on the Passat. The primary difference is that they mount on the sides of the trunk rather than the front surface, but might work for my application.

I ordered up some new springs for the front suspension because it appears that the used ones that I have have a 'squishy' feel to them and when I get into the vehicle it lowers about 1". These springs are from a 75-80 Spitfire MKIV because it seems that these model years vehicles are almost 200# heavier than the 71-74 model years and should result in a stiffer ride. I want to resolve this issue before I finalize the size of the wheel wheel openings around the tires, with a 'looser' spring I would have to make the openings larger.

Here is a picture of one:

This also means that I needed to finish up work in the air intakes to smooth the entry of air into the engine compartment. So the first order of work was to pull the engine so that there would be more room to work. Next we we cut up a number of pieces of foam and fitted them into the area, it is tough as there is not a whole lot of room to work! The plans call for putting a large radius on the leading edge of part G9 which forms the outside edge of the greenhouse/rollcage, but for the life of me I can not figure out why! The plans show this in a number of places and I have to suggest that if you are building a Vortex DO NOT CUT THE RADIUS INTO PARTS G9! I actually had to cut some extra pieces of foam to fill in this area so it actually caused more work in the long run...

I used my band saw to put a round end onto a piece of 1/4" plywood, and used it like a cave-man's tool to carve the foam, this actually worked pretty well and shaped the foam into the rough profile. Next I took some sandpaper and smoothed out the foam some more.

Next we laid up 2 layers of fiberglass mat into the area covering the foam and wrapping it at the end points. Here are some pictures so that you can see the air intakes glassed up:

The key to using bondo is to hardly put any down on the working surface, use your squeegee aggressively to remove as much as possible. Once hardened sand the surface to remove any irregularities and put down another thin coat until you are satisfied with the surface. I am very happy with the way that the air intakes look I think that besides making the air entry into the engine compartment smoother it makes the vehicle look more finished. Here is what one looks like basically finished:

Next I decided to move onto getting the door strikers in place, I made up a couple of plates basically out of sheet metal about 20gauge, cut holes to receive some 5/16" bolts to act as studs and welded them in from the backside. Then I cut out some large holes so that the fiberglass would bond between front and back. I put one layer of mat on the backside and one layer of mat on the front side then using some plastic wrap between the layup and a block of wood I clamped it in place. Once set I trimmed up the area using a razor blade and finally grinder.

This is where things went bad...

I realized with the angle that the door swings into place you cannot use the bear claw door latches in a vertical mounting position. The bear claw should be mounted 90 degrees from the angle of swing of the door as it approaches the striker plate. I have to redesign the way that the latches work on the doors!!!

I bought the another style of trunk hinges from a 93-99 VW Jetta the mounting surface is flatter and might make it easier to mounting them into the front trunk area, I wanted to leave some options open and figured that I wanted to take a look at these before I continued.

Single bear claw latches will not work on the Vortex when they are mounted in a vertical fashion. I has all has to do with the angle that the doors swing, single bear claw latches want to be mounted so that they are perpendicular to the swing of the door. When the doors were closed the striker was in the center of the claw, but when opening/closing the door the steep angle in which the doors moved made the striker impact the latch mechanism. Since I had the latches mounted vertically the swing angle caused interference, the latches would have to be mounted close to an angle that approaches the perpendicular swing of the door. A long time ago I remembered there being a double bear claw latch, and since there are 2 claws they should open wider than the single and possibly not make the angle quite as critical.

The following image shows the problem, the green is the swing of the door and the red signifies the striker:

I found a distributor of a double bear claw latch, the dimensions are 5-1/2" x 1-7/8". There is a smaller version on the website but they were back ordered so I decided to get the larger ones so that next weekend I can check out to see if they will work for my application.

At best they should work fine, with the worst case that I will have to mount them on an angle that is closer to the swing of the door making me rework the door frames as little as possible, the wider gap between the claws gives me more latitude in the final mounting angle.

In studying the door latch problem I decided to angle the latches about 22-1/2 degrees to help compensate for the swing of the doors. You probably could use the single bear claw latches but you would have to increase the mounting angle more, in using the double bear claw latches it gives me more leniency on the angle. I cut some 3/4" tubing to help position the latches where desired and welded them up. Here is what one looks like:

I also mounted the striker plates using the latches to basically tell me where they should go. I made up a couple of mounting plates with 5/16" studs welded from the backside into it to help mount the striker plates. I put some large holes in them so that the fiberglass mat would "connect" from front to back. Here is a picture of one of them:

I also made up a block of wood (covered with plastic wrap) and had 2 holes drilled where the mounting plate studs protruded to clamp the whole thing in place. I ground down all surfaces and used one layer of mat behind and one layer of mat in the front and clamped the whole assembly with a large clamp as shown:

With the door situation finally under control I moved my attention to the front trunk. I needed to form a lip around the edge to hold some rubber sealing strips. I ripped up some wood so that there would be a 3/8" recess under the trunk hood and about a 1/2" wide landing. Using some wood glue and a brad gun I tacked all the pieces and then clamped them into position around 3 sides of the front trunk area (I will be doing something slightly different for the front edge of the trunk). Here is a picture of the lip clamped in place:

Next I moved back to the hinge situation, I recently received the other style hinges and after looking them over quite a bit decided that I wanted to see if I could get the original hinges to work for me (ok I flip-flopped!). I did not like the way that the longer hinge opened up, the hinges would move the trunk lid up and swing the bottom of the lid quite a ways into the trunk area. In addition they are easily 2x the size so I figured that if I could not get the original hinges to fit properly that the bigger ones would be a backup solution.

I had to make up a U bracket from a couple pieces of angle iron so that I could bolt them through the sides of the trunk, extend past the trunk lip and mount the hinges onto the other side of the U, one bolt goes into the headlight area and one in the empty void in front of the headlight. I trimmed out as much steel on the mounting face so that as little as possible would show from the interior of the trunk. I also had to make up some 1" spacers for bolting the rear of the hinge to the bracket. Here are a couple of pictures showing the hinges:

Then I made up some support plates from 20gauge steel, put a couple of holes in it to mount some 1/4" bolts through, and then fill it full of holes for the fiberglass to adhere through. These are pretty similar to the supports that I made for mounting the door striker plates.

I used a stick to transfer the hinge mounting hole locations onto the body of the Vortex, placed the trunk lid back down and transferred the locations to the underside of the lid. Next I ground down the areas to be glassed and used a die grinder to make a recessed area for the bolt heads.

I then made up a couple of wood blocks and wrapped them with plastic wrap, and put one layer of mat underneath and two layers on top of the support plate and then clamped the whole thing in place.

Once the resin went off I removed the clamps and trimmed up the area. Finally I mounted the trunk lid, reconnected the nitrogen cylinders and tried it out. I have to do some alignment but it works and looks great!

I realized that I wanted to recess the lights into the current rear canopy as much as possible so put some lines down onto the area and using a grinder ground out a basic area for the lights. After further location and refinement I also cut into the1/4" plywood in order to achieve proper placement of the leading edge of the lights as shown:

First thing that I had to do was to create a way to mount them and I decided to use some 20gauge steel that I had laying around. So I cut a couple lengths of about 5-1/2" wide strips of steel, using the foam that came with the lights I needed to open up some areas behind the lights so that access and replacement of bulbs was possible from the back side of the unit. Using my plasma I cut out some clearance areas and then dummied up the lights. I used 2 separate pieces of steel so that I could correctly position them independently.

Next I drilled out some holes to mount the lights into the steel and then dummied up the 2 pieces of steel to positively locate the tail lights across the span of the rear of the vehicle being careful to ensure that they extended the same amount from the back as well as aligning the bottom edges of the lights to make them look as uniform as possible from the back of the vehicle. Then once in position I tack welded the steel together, the next photo shows the them temporarily held in place with some clamps. Then the lights were removed and I also put in two 1/4" bolts in the center where the clamps were as well as two small screws towards the outside to hold them into position as well.

Next I put the lights back into place and used some 2" foam to form the top portion and 3" of foam to form the bottom portion, as well as using a 1" piece of foam in between the lights (eventually to mount the license plate). Then using my shaping sticks profiled out the entire outside portion of the rear area a lot of care went into following the profile of the lights as well as tapering the underside so that it followed the profile of the lower side of the vehicle. Prior to glassing I put each tail light into a plastic garbage bag cut off excess and taped it shut. Once done I used two layers of 6oz glass to cover the entire foamed in area and tie it back into the rear canopy area.

With the rear canopy removed from the vehicle I stood it up vertically to make it easier to lay up the glass, it made things a whole lot easier as gravity typically tends to work against you.

An important note is that at the time of glassing I put the wrapped tail lights back into their position, I did this so that there would not be any interference problems to get the lights back into position once the resin hardened! Had I not done this there would be the possibility that after the resin hardened there might be the chance that the lights might not fit, causing a lot of tough grinding inside the cavities...

Below are a bunch of shots showing the completed tail light section that I am COMPLETLY happy with! The top of the taillights taper from front to back which augments the upper lines of the vehicles body that taper at almost the same amount, I love the look and think that it really completes the vehicle and finally pulls it into a nearly completed state. I really can't complain too much as to date I have about 5 months worth of work put into the doors/body/rear canopy.

Here are pictures taken from various angles:

Well after 1 day of deconstruction and 1 day of frame construction he got 2 of the 3 things that he desired. A lot of work to strip down interior door skins and building of the new door frames. The first day was a lot of deconstruction of the doors, we needed to 'peel' them back so that all that existed was the outside 'skins' attached to the original hinges on the windshield frame. This also involved removal of ALL of the interior foam and carpeting that was put into place. I did not want to chance creating a fire when welding and end up burning the vehicle!

I have to say that Alex did a very good job on the initial doors as the frameworks that we made are very symmetrical from side to side. In addition he seemingly paid a lot attention to laying up of the initial fiberglass. It was interesting as as we 'delaminated' the doors we noticed 2 different methods, at one time he appeared to have one approach in construction and at a later date he added some other components to the door structures. It was very interesting in looking over the details of one persons labors that obviously spanned numerous years...

The plan was to get the steel positioned against the existing 'door skins' so that they could eventually be glassed onto the existing doors as well as form the framework so that the pneumatic cylinders would apply pressure to the new steel frames as well as creating the recessed section in the bottom of the door panels so that air could be directed into the engine compartment to cool the engine.

It took pretty much the entire day to make up the frames and get the positioned exactly as desired. Lots of work in cutting and positioning each individual piece of the framework so that each piece was sized and located exactly as needed. Here is a picture of the completed door frames:

You should be able to see in the pictures below the shimming that we did to space the door frame away from the chassis, I used 1/2" spacers across the bottom and leading edge, and 1/4" at the bottom of the trailing edge. The top of the trailing edge was positioned so that the tubing fell basically in the middle of the existing door/window frame. These shims were temporarily put in with small brads to help position them when when the frames get glassed in, and then the spacers will be removed once no longer needed.

In the end Dustin got what he basically wanted, steel frames for his doors that make the lower air intakes functional, what he did not get was the double claw bear latches as we simply flat ran out of space in which to install them into the same approximate area as I had previously installed my latches into my doors. This area will be contemplated by Dustin to install some mechanism(s) to provide door latching as well as a locking mechanism in the future.

In 2 weeks the vehicle will go to PS Composites and there Paul Schreiner will pull in the lower section of the doors, fiberglass the frames to the doors, interior door panels, modify the headlight/turn signal areas and what ever else that Dustin wants done.