The adjustable pins are designed to mount through sheet metal with nuts and washers. I measured and identified locations where I’d have enough clearance for the “stack height” of the assembly, and where the roof skin was flat enough for the latch. Spring tension in the latch should help dampen vibrations. Push the button on the top to release, it stays released until you press it back down on the ball. Billet aluminum latches have a ball bearing ring that snaps closed around a ball-top adjustable hood pin. $100 total, shipped from China, was more in the budget. But there’s no way I was going to buy $1200 worth of latches for my roof. I’m not usually into such things… I buy the real deal whenever I can. Then I found a source for Chinese knock-offs of the Quik-Latch. The Quik-Latch latches looked perfect for the application… but they are $300 a pair! And I was probably going to need 8 of them… I looked at several kinds of flush-mount latches. I was headed that direction, but really didn’t want pins sticking up through the roof. Dick suggested last year that I use hood pins. Things that were designed to hold on roof panels… and just about everything else you could imagine. I looked at hundreds of different types of hardware. Now, to attach it… I spent the better part of a year searching for the best attachment approach for the roof.

Just going for “good enough” for right now… if it all works out, I’ll take it apart and refinish later. Painted the underside with satin black chassis & roll bar paint. Measure, mark, and split the panel with the nibbler.Īpplied a few coats of silver wheel paint, which is a pretty close match to the Pure Silver. Not going for perfection it’s gonna get banged up anyway. I cut the rear profile to match the curvature of the top of the new rear spoiler. So hours of time with about 20 cutting wheels in an angle grinder, plus more cutting with my air nibbler, and… I just needed the roof skin, cut to shape. These have a ton of layers of steel welded into a “sandwich” with air gaps, to make a very stiff, strong structure.īut I didn’t need any of that. I finally found an R53 roof at a salvage yard about an hour away, for a couple hundred dollars. I started searching for another roof nearby, at a price I would pay. Sadly, I only thought of this a few months after sending the GP carcass to the shredder… it would have been the perfect roof donor.

The best starting point for this would be an R50/R53 roof assembly.

But right away, I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a removable hard top for such trips. It served its purpose, keeping me and passengers mostly dry during wet trips.

Last year, I fabricated a “bikini” style soft top for the GP Roadster.

240sx with quik latch hood pins