914/6 GT Cibie Spotlight mount fab, winter project Options

[Retroracer]

I’ve always been fascinated by the front lower spotlight mounting that appears on some of the GT cars, notably the winning 1970 Marathon de la Route cars. A few years ago I got a chance to obtain some original Cibie Iode 45 lamps from a seller in France. These had yellow lenses – one fog, one driving - which matched the yellow Cibie Tango’s I have mounted in my GT tribute car already, in the “standard” fog light position within the fiberglass front bumper.

Not clear to me was how the factory fabricated brackets were designed. The inverted “T” cut into the fiberglass bumper meant that the brackets must somehow get fed through that to get mounted; also somehow they mount to the body and may / may not hold the bumper on? Searching in-period as well as recent pictures did not yield many clues; a few detailed the outside construction and bracing, but I had no clear idea of what was behind the bumper cut out. Until: luckily last summer I did get a chance to see the original “Number 2” Marathon car up close at Luft 6, so took the opportunity to crawl around under the front of the car to try and see what was going on.

That is, until folks who were waiting to take unobstructed pictures of the legendary vehicle were bored of waiting for the strange geezer lying on his back peering into the oil cooler opening….!





I took some detailed pics and thought that attempting to make up some brackets might be a good winter project. It is not clear to me (on olde number 2) whether the brackets were the originals or replicas – but I learned enough to want to try and replicate them.

So the brackets themselves (as the pics show) look pretty basic on the face of it. But some thought obviously went into the design, as they need to meet multiple criteria:

- be shaped such that they can be fed through the inverted “T” cut in the bumper
- secure the bumper to the body
- have welded in bracing to prevent the lights vibrating & flexing
- clear the front valance mounting tabs (which are just below the bumper mount holes)



The upper piece in this shot shows the side profile I went for, bent up in aluminum as a test for clearance; one of the main bracket is being fab'ed using mild steel.



The cut in the bumper (fiberglass) was done with fingers crossed but turned out to be correct, the shot below shows a test fit & alignment check before cutting the vertical:



I welded some M6 nuts to the strips to use as mounts, aligned with the holes in the bumper and the body. Cutting the bracing pieces needed some experimentation and mocking up, as looking carefully at the existing photos of the OUTSIDE, it was hard to judge overall dimensions – extension, drop, etc. – so in the end it was basically a visual judgement call.



and....