The Flip-Flop Hood

One of the big challenges for the BatBerry is trying to get it to fit in my garage!  The car measures about 21 feet from tip of the rear wing to the tip of the nose.  The problem is that the standard house garage measures on average 20 feet long.  See the problem 🙂

So when I was down to visit Doug Hines at Gotham Cruisers, I wanted to make sure that I took some accurate measurements to see if I could make the car fit in my house garage in any shape or form.  After all, what good is a Batmobile if you can’t drive it to pick up some groceries or drop your kids off at school.

The measurements that I took while I was at Doug’s shop were 18′ 3″ from the tip of the rear wings to the front of the Caprice frame that the car was built on.  Which is luckily the same frame that I will be using for my BatBerry.  The good news is that it will clear a standard garage length by almost two feet.  The challenge is, how to park it in the garage when it’s finished without having to remove the entire front section of the car?

The solution came to me when I remembered some trunk hinges that I was looking at for my Subaru where you could flip flop the trunk.  This was basically a dual hinge setup that would allow for pivot points so that the trunk would lay flat just like it was closed but it would still be fully open.  This is kind of hard to explain, but if you check out the flip-flop link above you will see what I mean.

I then started thinking about how I was going to apply this concept to the BatBerry.  One good point is that the Batmobile actually does have the concept of a hood.  But it’s the same kind of concept as cars where the entire front end of the car becomes the hood and hinges forward in front of the the front wheels.

This is where I brought in the dual pivot point idea on the hood and the solution is really quite simple.  Two bars attached to the frame and attached to the hood.  Then provide a pivot point on each end of the bars.  This allows the hood to initially pivot forward to clear the body in front of the canopy and then hinge upward and over the canopy.  It should also leave some room to open the canopy and climb out.  You can see the system in action from the animation at the top of this post.

This leaves two options for getting the car into the garage:

1. Back the car into the garage and then flip-flop the hood
2. Flip-flop the hood with enough clearance to see, pull the car into the garage nose first and then get out with enough clearance for the canopy

I’ll also have to put a latch/catch system in place so that once the hood is propped up in the air it won’t pivot anymore and come crashing down.  But that should be the simple part 🙂