File this under “design elegance – fail”.
Quite a while ago I fooled around with homemade substitutes for the truss head bolts used on the pop top. The bolts which invariably end up rusting and staining the fibreglass. However I never did get around to replacing the hinge bolts, I had this notion that I was going to incorporate some sort of clever plate that would double as a roof rack mount. Well I never did do that and this morning I set about to make some simple washers. I used some aluminium round stock and some phillips head M6 X 1.00 stainless machine screws and produced clumsy, but effective, truss head substitutes. I suppose a good excuse is that I needed to make 8 of them and I really could not be bothered beveling the washers. Perhaps I still can make a roof rack mount and incorporate these clumsy things.
Important note: one has to be careful that the bolts/screws used are only long enough to just go through the 10 mm nut on the backside of the hinge. If too long, the bolts will hang up on the hinge when the pop top is lowered.
shooftie 