Trunk lid lock protection bar
project by Kees Stein and Maarten Tromp, author Maarten Tromp, published , 452 words.
What do you do when the trunk lid of your car stops closing properly? You investigate and (over)engineer a solution.
Protection bar close-up
In this article:
My first car was a Peugeot 205 Terberg. The model is like a regular 3 door Peugeot 205, but fitted with a plastic extension on the top and back to make it into a light van. It was perfect for me, a lot of stuff fitted in the trunk (sound system, servers, bed) and the car had room for a single passenger. It was cheap, light, fast enough and fuel efficient.
One part of the conversion was not thought all the way through, the way the trunk lid closed. The lid had a normal lock that grabs a pin, but the pin itself was sticking straight up in the door opening. Normally on a Peugeot 205 the pin sits at an angle, because the trunk lid is at an angle, and you never hit it while loading stuff in the trunk. But after the conversion the trunk lid is vertical and so is the pin. Everything you lift in the trunk now hits the pin. And since the pin sits on a flimsy angle bracket, it bends inwards and then the lid doesn't lock anynmore. It took me a while to figure out why lid would not lock at times and started to use a bungee cord to hold closed instead. When I finally found the culprit I wasn't sure how to fix it. I kept bending the pin back up, but it kept being bent down again. Clearly a better and more permanent solution was needed.
Luckily Kees, my stepdad, is a mechanical engineer. He has experience with with metalworking and was willing to help me come up with a solution. We decided to make a metal protection bar that goes over the pin.
First we bent a metal bar, formerly part of espagnolette window lock, into a U-shape. Heating it up over the furnace in the kitchen and then bending it over some bricks were things I, being an electrical engineer, would have never thought of. Then we welded the U-shaped piece on an angle profile. This was also something I had never done before. Who would have thought mechanical engineering would be this useful? Lastly we mounted the angle profile on the bottom of the trunk, so that the U-shaped bar sits over the pin. With a little paint it wasn't even all that noticeable.
The project was a success! The protection bar is still on the car to this day and working flawlessly. It just goes to show that with a little creativity and some help from someone with the right skills, you can solve almost any problem.