Re: Headlight Covers

[Scott Fisher <sfisher71@domain.elided>]

--- Forza <headroom@domain.elided> wrote:
> Hello, I'm in the middle of spring fix-up on my 86
> Spider.  One thing I've 
> always admired is the Plex-glass head light covers
> of the early Spiders.

I just replaced the covers on mine, and learned a bit
in the process.

> Questions are:
> Who makes the Genuine Covers?

Carello, same people who make the rear lenses and
headlight assemblies.

> Where can I purchase them?

I bought mine from Rainer Hurtienne in Germany, had
them shipped to Oregon.  Prices at any of the US
sellers is about $200-$220 for the whole installation
kit; I paid $133 with shipping from Germany.

Here's the detail page inside their site with the
headlamp listing:

https://diamant.safe-order.de/alfahurtienne/htdocs/english/seite44.htm

Here's the top-level URL for them (well, top-level in
English):

http://www.alfahurtienne.de/htdocs/english/index.htm

You can also download their "catalog" (which is their
Web site) and browse it on your local computer, then
go on the Web to place your order.

Shipping took -- well, it's hard to say, as my family
put these up for me when the arrived and I didn't open
them till Christmas. :-)  About a month, more or less.

Note that in the page that I call out, you will need
to buy two each of 7, 9, and 10 (though there are
options for 10), and four each of 8.  I'll explain as
I go.

> Are they difficult to install "properly?"

Fiddly, but not necessarily difficult.  You WILL want
to see a picture of a European Spider to understand
what "properly" is.  I'll describe what I can, but
some of this may not click into place till you see a
car with them as the factory installed them.

The covers are held in place at three points on the
car.  Two of them are the tabs at the trailing edge of
the cover; these fit into slots in the fender.  The
third place is a clip that holds down the apex of the
cover and is screwed into the fender.

> I've seen some that have a chrome ring they fit
> into.. Most do not?  Which is original?

Okay -- so your Spider has chrome trim rings around
the headlights, yes?  You will be removing those rings
to fit the Carellos "properly."  You will then note
that your US-spec Spider's headlights stick out
slightly in front of the leading edge of the fender. 
To fit the Carellos as the factory intended, you need
to change that by removing not only the headlight, but
the headlight BUCKET, and mount the whole thing behind
the fender instead of in front of it.  The previous
owner did that on my car, so I can't speak to the ease
or difficulty of the task.

Once the headlamps are "sunk" into the fenders, there
may be a very slim trim ring designed to go around
them -- it doesn't show on Hurtienne, but it does on
the U.S. sellers' catalogs.

There also appear to be slots cut or punched in the
portion of the fender surrounding the headlight. 
These may be in all Spiders from Pininfarina; I'm
guessing they are because the mounting tabs on the
Carellos are all in the same place and they're
original spec for the European Spiders.  

The part called out as 8 in the picture on Rainer
Hurtienne's Web site is a little nylon sleeve/tab,
designed to go into these slots in your fender.  They,
in turn, hold the tabs that are built into the
headlamp cover.  Note that I ran my Spider without
these nylon sleeves for two years, and the right-hand
cover rattled badly for most of that time -- I didn't
know any better, only discovering the tabs last
November or whenever I ordered the covers.  They're
important.

The chrome clip (part 9) then holds the nose of the
cover down by one of a couple of mechanisms.  The part
listed as 10 in Hurtienne is a machine screw that
takes a 10mm ATF (across-the-flats) metric nut. 
Whoever installed my Spider's headlamp covers, on the
other hand, went much simpler and drilled a hole large
enough for a #10 sheet-metal screw.  When my 10mm
machine screws arrived and were clearly too large for
the holes in my car, I thought about the solutions. 
Reaching up inside the nose of the car and holding a
10mm nut with one hand while tightening the screw with
the other seemed unnecessarily masochistic, even for
an ex-Britcar owner like me.  Joe Cantrell suggested
what he did: use nutserts, a sort of self-tightening
nut insert (like a molly screw for drywall, I guess?).
 I went, eventually, with the easy solution and bought
some nice chrome-plated #10 x 1" machine screws, which
are on the car now, and have not required drilling
additional holes.  For my $1.99, I bought five of
them, so I have three spares.

> Are they tough to keep clean? (it seems as if the
> wind (dirt) must get behind them)

They wash easily, but dirt DOES get behind them,
especially when you drive in the rain.  This is why I
didn't want to go with the 10mm nut solution, as I had
the covers on and off the car a couple times a year
for serious washing/detailing.  And then it wasn't so
much to wash the covers as to wash the headlamp
nacelles beneath them -- the water pools up where it
normally does on a Spider, but you can't wipe it out
with a towel.

> Do they defuse the light?

That's hard to say.  The DOT headlamps on my Spider
are weak and getting weaker -- another reason to make
the covers easily removable, as I'll be improving the
headlights later this year.  The biggest problem I had
with them was that my old covers were faded, fogged,
and cracked, and this absorbed a lot of the dim glow
that oozed out of the DOT sealed beams.  (Yeah, yeah,
I know, I sound like a Eurolight geek from the Audi
digest... :-)

> Do they shake, rattle, or otherwise make noise?
> Do they tend to disappear?  Lost or stolen?

Considering the difficulty of installing them on a
Civic or an Acura, I doubt there's much call for them.
 

> Thanks again... you people are the best!

Hey, we understand about these "silly waste of money"
cars.  Well, SOME of us do, anyway. :-)

Best,

--Scott Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon
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