Some visible changes have occurred in the restoration of Lope’s Hope 3rd these past few weeks. All of the cowl formers have been fabricated and fitted. Fitting of the new top cowl skins is being done now.
Ryan fits upper cowl skins.
Work on the doghouse and scoop progresses.
Always a noticeable assembly is the windscreen. Using original but now unserviceable bullet resistant curved side windows from the windscreen, a REN tooling material board was machined duplicating the left and right side curvature. That template enabled a California glass specialty company to be sure they had replicated the glass configuration to era correct specifications. The new laminated glass windscreen side windows are being custom made to original specs with two layers of formed glass sandwiching a .090 layer of PVB (Polyvinyl butyral) plastic.
Original windscreen side glass
The flat one and a half inch thick, bullet proof front panel of the windscreen is complete and has five glass layers sandwiching PVB between them.
New laminated bullet proof center windscreen glass
Once the new side glass pieces arrive, permanent glass installation will be close behind.
One of the more difficult skin sections is a seven foot long piece of Alclad that forms the top of the turtle deck. Special tooling had to be devised to form it to the curvature that the engineering drawings specified.
Each week brings Lope’s Hope closer to being a Mustang and not just Mustang parts.
