I have spent the past couple of evenings outside, in the sunshine, hard at work at a bench grinder cleaning up the hoops for the hood on my Jupiter. It's the last part of the car to be done, and has been something of a puzzle as it evidently had been messed around with by a previous owner. As with every other bit of metal on the car, there were silly amounts of paint on the hoops, but thankfully they are otherwise in pretty good condition with only a little bit of surface rust which has come off with the wheel and a bit of TLC.
The hinges for the hood mechanism have been hand made for it, and the wood has also needed to be replaced, all of which has been something of a challenge (mostly taken on by my other half).
Here is the hood frame as it was before we started work:
My task this week has been to clean up all the metalwork, prime it and paint it. I'm plumping for satin finish black hammerite as it should be sufficiently hard-wearing for the hoops and as far as I know they wouldn't have been body-coloured when it came out of the factory. Now all I need is the weather to stay good until the end of the week so that I can get the painting done
Luckily for me, just when I think it's safe to sit straddling bits of car, along comes my dad with a camera:
Once the metal's been primed and painted we'll be re-assembling the frame, hopefully for the final time, and then will be getting ready for Napoleon to have the first fitting of his hood, which is being made by the Grumpy Northerner's rather wonderful wife. She's already made two mock-ups and we've had the fittings of those, and tweaked where necessary. We are borrowing an idea from my MX5 and making the rear window zip-out on three sides so that it doesn't get cracked or obscured with continuous folding - this wasn't an original Jowett feature, but it's a very neat idea and it worked well on the mock-up hood that was made for Napoleon so we're going with it in the final version.