I changed out my trunk springs (a few had failed on each side). My boot was slightly unaligned before, and when I reattached in the same marked position, the trunk doesn’t stay all the way open but slowly closes halfway. Just not quite enough to hold it open. If I change the angle of the boot, it stays up.
As I said, my boot wasn’t perfect before, so I’m trying to adjust it to see if I can both get it perfect and keep it open all the way.
Has anyone else had this problem? I’m thinking of grabbing some more trunk springs and trying 6 per side instead of 5.
"Mike, I’ve done a half dozen or so by simply taking the
hinge off, poking a scribe or awl through the hole of the
springs, clamping the scribe in a vise and using a
screwdriver to nest the 5 or 6 springs together.
Then clamp them with a pair of needle-nose vise grips to
hold the hole in alignment, put the screw in it and bolt
them loosely to the hinge.
Then clamp the hinge in the vise and use a large screwdriver
to roll them over the stop.
Works every time. Just be careful because if they snap
back, they can take a chunk out of a finger.
I did this at a tech session our local club had and did two
cars worth in less than an hour.
I think the normal number of springs is supposed to be 5 to
a side but I did 6 on mine and the boot lid snaps smartly to
attention when you pull the latch lever.
I discovered this technique before the posting on
classicjaguar but it is essentialy the same thing."
X2 on adding an extra spring on each side - did it from the get go as I saw no reason not too.
Still won’t open all the way when the luggage rack is in place and even less if there is a suitcase on there - but w/o the rack it opens smartly (actually added a bit of fuel line over the stop to cushion hinge a bit when it opens).
There is no reason to think that a boot spring made in 1970 was made to have the same elasticity as one made in 2015, so perhaps 6 instead of 5 is no bad thing. The real clue to your problem is that you have changed the hinge alignment. For the boot lid springs to not fight friction, you have to have both hinges lined up exactly parallel to each other front to back and also to be exactly in the same vertical plane. If that is not so, then as you open the lid, one spring has to push a hinge (and heavy lid) sideways or across. The hinge itself, if it were a rose joint or a U-joint, would do this easily, but it can only open/close smoothly in one plane, so a hinge misalignment loses all of the spring’s energy as the 5 (or 6) springs are trying to cut across each other.
6th spring nailed it. Pops up exactly as I would expect.
Now of course I’m stupidly searching for alignment perfection – which I didn’t have before – but which is bothering me now that I’m putting everything back together.
What’s the best way to actually adjust these. I found this post:
The right side of the lid was low in the middle, so I pulled some shims from the right side, and and it’s darn close now. My remaining problems is too large of a gap on the left front side of the lid. There are so many adjustment points. I count:
The hinge to the body
The shims in the hinge to the body
The hinge to the angle piece that connect to the lid
The angle iron to the lid
I adjusted the bolt that attaches the angle iron to the lid, which helped closed the gap, but now when I close the trunk the back left is offset past the left edge. Spent an hour or two and feel like I’m running around with my head cutoff.