How to Install Dzus Rails: Tech Tip Tuesday

hey guys Doug from motion today we're back with another tech tip Tuesday today we're going to show you how to install Zeus rails on a car of course this one isn't as nice as the one you have at home but we have a surefire method to making sure you place the Zeus's adjust them correctly and not screw up the paint along with it additionally the actual placement is so important because if you've ever tried to put a hood on it had the Zeus's not exactly centered or positioned correctly it can be a real pain so we'll show you how to do it so that you can have a nice fitting hood and make sure that install taking it on and off every day every time you're at the track is very easy okay so here's what you're gonna need for this project you're gonna need a hand drill and probably 1/8 inch drill bit you are going to need a step bit or the exact size bit for the Zeus bottoms but most people don't have a drill bit that size because it's actually pretty large so a step bit works just fine and we'll show you how that works a very small drill bit and a very small screw I believe this is a number 4 size screw I'll show you what that's for here in a little bit but you want to make sure the drill bit is smaller than the actual screw itself just a pen we're not gonna use a sharpie because we want to be accurate a Phillips screwdriver to screw those in some blue painters tape if you have a set of calipers they don't have to be good ones but just cheap calipers I'll show you what that's for later a sliding square ruler very important piece these are just more of the screws and then you'll need a set of motion resource rails if you have other Zeus's of course it'll work the same way but today we're gonna show you how to do Zeus rails so we bought this lightweight show neck composites hood for our fox body it's just fiberglass it's a flat hood because that's all this thing is gonna run most of these hoods require you to trim them so for this piece of the puzzle just leave all the like the stock bumpers on the fender wells and get it trimmed up first because you don't want to be doing that as you're installing juices we did the trimming on this yesterday so we're gonna be good to go I would also suggest getting yourself a nice body stand like this Harbor Freight sells them I think for like 20 bucks when you're going back and forth it allows you to work on this without being on which is really nice and helpful so this same technique can be used for any zeus fastener especially any zeus rail we sell them for g-body third-gen Camaro stocks bodies s tens and everything else you can think of so don't feel like this is just for fox bodies this will apply to all of them since we already have the hood fitted another thing you'll want to look at right here are these bumpers these are just the factory rubber bumper pieces we're gonna go ahead and pop those out because they're gonna be in our way so get rid of those and you won't need them anymore okay so the next thing you're gonna want to do is get yourself some painters tape and put a liberal amount of tape on both the fenders in the hood now of course this thing's a kind of a pile of crap so we're not worried about the paint on this thing but it serves as a dual purpose you're gonna use this for measurements and for protecting paint so if you have a nice car you might want to put paint or some tape down in here just don't put it on this edge because you're gonna be working there riveting and screwing stuff so you probably want to have to try and peel the tape out around the screws later on alright so I use this nice wide tape it's gonna give us a lot of room to do what we want to do with everything and you'll see I'm just gonna kind of put it right up to the edge of that that fender corner if it hangs over just a little bit it's not gonna hurt you just don't want it wrapping all the way down and then you want to smooth out all the bubbles you might even consider putting a second row in here this is gonna be both here kind of a notepad and where you're gonna mark measurements that to this is such a great paint job on this thing we're back down to bare metal on here okay so this poor car's gonna need a new paint job before it's done but we don't mind that we kind of like how nasty this of course all of this works way better if you do this type of a project before the car is painted but I've actually installed these rails on several cars that were painted you definitely can do this without her damaging paint all right now we're gonna add some tape to the hood itself obviously since we're drilling in this thing even if it's not painted this thing's a joke it'll keep the surface from getting a bunch of imperfections that your body man has to work out later not to mention that they'll again serve us marking and measuring as well again you don't want it to wrap around because it actually might throw off your measurements so the next step is we're gonna go ahead and open our Zeus rails you'll notice we anodized these black and that's for a reason because a lot of hoods don't fit perfectly and if they're not oversized like the seanix sho'nac ones are you can't trim them in and keep them tight especially if a car is old and sagging or whatever so then you have the silver stripe if they're not anodized and you know if you have like a blue car or an orange car or black car any car you know that silver stripe running down they're just kind of it doesn't look good to the eyes it just breaks things up but black just looks like a standard gap so the next thing you want to do is just kind of hold up and approximate where things are going these ones for the fox-body are designed you can see the front has a little fall over corner and then the back goes right to the back basically that's just so it can kind of prop as far forward on the hood as possible obviously we don't have you know a fastener all the way up there the other thing you'll see is these things come flat there's just no possible way that you can form this thing in any reproducible manner where it's 90 degrees here and then rolled like that but the way there these things are made out of 53 56 aluminum and it's pretty fairly bendable so what I do is I just kind of you know get my starting point in the back here that gives me an idea where we want to start and then you can actually just kind of bend it by hand the other thing you can do is start fastening it here and then as you go down just kind of bend it a little bit at a time and then when you get to the front you know as you're fascinating it's going to hold it to where it needs to go so basically at this point once we find our starting place in the back we're also going to set our approximate gap I say approximate because we have some adjustment if you look in these rails we put a slot in them and what that does is allows you to put a set screw of tight of sorts that number four screw I showed you earlier you know you're gonna get this thing pretty close but that gives you some up-and-down adjustments so you can set the height of your hood right here before you want to go ahead and nail it with rivets because it'd just be really tough to do this right off the bat the first time and that gives you a little bit of leeway and ability to change things and adjust things before you're finalized so we'll go ahead and start that so we can make a whole nother video about Zeus fasteners Tim McAmis has a really good video too about Zeus fastener but the other thing when you're ordering you want to measure the thickness of your hood that's not what the only reason we have these calipers but basically there's different spring packages and Zeus Heights and on our site when you order these there's a 83 125 and 127 option for ordering the hoods and that's the thickness so you want to get that spring height correct otherwise you know it's kind of a pain to put them on and off because if the spring depth is what determines how far the Zeus goes down and catches and everything if it's too shallow it's not going to be tight if it's too deep just can't ever get it to pull down in there so this thing looks like it's about a 120 or 130 thousands or so so our 127 125 spring package will work perfectly the other thing is now that we know this depth we can basically take our caliper here set it at that depth lock it in place and then we can hold this to the edge of the fender and set our depth approx using this little piece that sticks out here I'm not sure if you guys have ever used that before on your caliper zone especially if this is your first pair of calipers so a good way if you've never looked at a sheet metal screw this way or any self-tapping screw you want the drill bit to be larger than just about the same size as a middle but larger than the threads you can see the look if you look real close I'm not sure we can get this on camera but the threads are actually larger than the drill so basically you're trying to catch between the two you don't have a lot of wiggle room with these small screws now we're gonna run this in this fairly snug we can always tighten it later what we're gonna do now is just kind of go down the row you know obviously you have some up-and-down travels we can set our gap later but in the meantime we'll just get everything kind of temporarily in place if this formed correctly and then we'll set the gap next so it's a good idea to just set this you know set your calipers on the defender yeah I just want to make sure you're use there's a long and a short piece of the caliper make sure it's as you know accurate as possible as far as being flat on the fender because that's the contour if you know if you tip it too far that way or too far this way you're gonna get a false reading so keep that flat just keep it a general place obviously like I said before we have plenty of adjustment here so it's good on the road and drill all your holes set yourself up for success by having them you know reasonably in the neighborhood of where they need to be as you can see I'm actually kind of like tweaking this as I go so that you know if if all sudden you just make a big turn at once or a big crease at once that's gonna be not ideal as far as looks and function so as I'm I'm kind of like tweaking it with this hand as I'm drilling this one and then obviously when we screw them the final times they'll stay in place I found it using the drill kind of wobbles too much on these types of screws so especially if you have nice paint you're gonna that's a lot of room for error so another thing you want to consider when you're first mocking these up making sure that both screw where you're gonna put screw holes and then rivet holes a lot of these fenders have tons of holes down them so you kind of want to make sure you shift it this way or that way so you avoid those so you can get all the fastener locations that you want to get I've made that mistake before where I lay like three of them over holes and then all sudden you're trying to find out how you're gonna secure this thing and then also you want to plan for how you're going to get your rivet gun into all these locations [Music] so now we got that side done what you'll want to do is just take your calipers over here and measure this distance to the back that way you can match it up that way the hood looks the same everything symmetrical just makes for a lot nicer finished product the other thing you want to consider when you're placing these is how far forward you are for instance you can easily get past to where the last fasteners are actually into this front bumper support now that might add some strength to it on one piece front ends you won't have to worry about that but on a stock front end where you still wanna be able to pull the bumper off just you know think about the fact that you would actually have to drill out rivets to take the bumper often and put rivets back in to put it back on so you don't want to do that so just make sure it's far enough back to where your last fasteners are still an offender and not into the bumper save you a lot of headache later okay yeah that'll work now you want to make sure you reset this back so you can check your depth as you start your next one lock it in it's a little bit tall still it should be pretty close as you can see when you kind of go through this just so naturally starts to curve this Zeus rail a lot of people are really worried about it in the beginning but if you just start at the back and work this way every spot that you you know kind of nailed down just makes its own curve just got to make sure you check with your caliper as you go so some of these actually have double thickness metal and so you want to use appropriate length screw if it's got like a you know backer and they're you you only really need to go through one you know thickness of metal but another thing that can help when it gets if they're if they're back-to-back double pieces of metal it'll actually make this really hard to screw in because it'll want to be pushing it and they'll break the screw off so you can just do a little webster wobble with the drill bit in there and that'll open it up make things a little bit easier it's got to be a very precise webster wobble though all right now the zoo squirrels are mounted so now we're gonna get back to using the square you probably were wondering what that was for basically what we want is we want to make sure that we hit that Center because if you're off set either you're having to push the hood to get the Zeus to start or the hood starts to kind of curl up and look nasty or you send up with just a really poor fitting hood so this part is probably one to take the most time with basically what we're gonna do is find the center of it and the reason why I said don't use a sharpie is because the more precise this mark is the thickness of a sharpie I'll actually make you off no matter how good you are so we're gonna basically find the center of this hole and then mark it because we're going to use this mark later on you can find the center in various different fashions or you can just get it pretty close to your eyeball so as you can see this line is just going to go right through the middle of that hole and so when we put the hood on we'll just put our ruler back over it and then we can estimate exactly the first piece of the cross going the other way so I'll go ahead and mark all these you're always gonna have a certain amount of error and you can always slightly oversize the Zeus hole but you want to make sure things are as close as possible because those different tolerances stack up and really start to work against you after after a little bit so now we have this distance here now we're gonna have to find our distance for our next cross line so what i'm doing here is measuring with the scale right to the center of that hole there and i'm just gonna record this right next to here again like i said this is gonna be like your post-it note for the car itself hopefully you can see that mark chad bill so we're one we're gonna be inch oh thirty because the way the fender curls and changes all the way down you don't want to assume this numbers gonna be the same for each one again because that this can roll out and the fender can pitch and stuff so you actually see that same distance is way off center on this one so we're gonna measure each one of them mark them and and treat each one like its own measurement so going backwards i know we already marked those first those first holes but you want to make sure all of these are snug before you start doing this because if they're not tight they're not going to be representative of how they're gonna be when they're riveted so if you measure this distance now with it loose and then you tighten it you're gonna pull that whole thing likely this way now there's a little bit of adjustment you can do just by hand bending and stuff like that after you're done but you want to make sure they're really close because pulling this on and off and adjusting it like that especially if you have like in the middle loose and outsides tight or vice versa that can be a definitely a point of frustration so a good point for right there to save yourself some trouble down the road you want to get these as accurate as possible but obviously as we start to drill things the drill can walk and all that but again just like stack up anywhere else you want to make sure you mitigate it in the beginning that way you're not working your snot starting way wrong 35 all right so now we got the hood on here you can see I pre trim this thing so it's it's all sitting pretty good again I wouldn't worry too much about the height at this point if anything you want it to sit slightly low that way we can catch all of the you have something for the ruler to rest on and something to measure off of if the hoods sitting above the fender at this point it'll be hard to do that so for this part the tendency for people is to just go ahead and disturb just go down the line and drill all the holes again just like before we want to get this right the first time so what we're gonna do is we're going to measure and drill our first hole we're actually gonna put a Zeus in it without riveting the hood that way it stays put and then we're gonna work down this side one at a time putting a Zeus in each time and then after we get that done we're gonna move to the other side because when you tighten this down it'll pull things around and move them so we want to make sure that everything gets pinned perfectly make sure the Zeus is coming in out easy and then we'll move over to the other side and at that time you can kind of make a little bit of arch in the hood because as you see these hoods a lot of times come naturally like this so once we get this stationary we can kind of build a little bit of an arch into it of course adding some structure supports and stuff in the back in the front is always a good idea but you still side-to-side want to have like a natural kind of bow in the hood as you can see like right here this thing sitting way low in the middle compared to where it would be normally once we get this side stationary we can kind of push on it and put a little bit of pre tension into the hood to bring that back up to where it needs to be the other thing you can do is kind of wedge some things in there and that's probably the best option that way once you get these all put in place you can build a support you know to go to the same place once we mark everything for the first hole we're going to use a small drill bit for a pilot hole that way you can hit the dead center it's way easier to hit the center with a small pilot bit and then we're going to take the stepped it and go to to the right size so I'll show you a little trick for that as well if you look at the actual Zeus on the bottom there's a rounded portion there so what we're gonna do is figure out that measurement real close to it so that looks like it's about 868 50 and then we're gonna go over here to our step bit and figure out which ones are closest so you can actually lock this in place that what you kind of you aren't just wedging it on there see what your dimension is actually closest as you can see we have a pilot hole here so we'll just go ahead and drill down and the slower you go usually the better the results so you might at this point check out this Zeus and just see how it fits in the hole each Zeus is gonna be slightly different I can actually feel that it's slightly proud there I might actually stop there because it because it's so tapered and you have the thickness of the hood you don't want to go all the way down to the bottom because it's smaller at the bottom of that so this actually is gonna fit I think perfectly right where it's at it's a good idea to just rough up touch up the bottom and just get rid of all that stuff underneath there so it's not propping the hood up when you get underneath we actually came up with a nice high-tech way to prop a screwdriver up to hold that middle up for it down there so it falls right down in there so far so we're gonna go ahead and add a spring and we'll probably add all the springs now at this point so that we can go ahead and have something to grab on to and make sure we're hitting it correctly you're gonna put the spring and you can see there's two sets of holes this is that these bigger holes are actually for clearance for the Zeus rivets coming from the top okay so our Springs in there as you guys can see there's a slot in the bottom of this and then it twists from there so once it starts in the slot from there it's basically going to the twist is going to pull everything kind of downward so if you watch like I said those holes are for the bottom of the rivets that hold it onto the hood but you can see that this how it just kind of goes down on that spring so if you get the wrong spring package or if you don't measure your hood ahead of time properly you know phew 10 20 thousands will actually be the difference between it catching that spring and not catching that spring so you want to make sure you give us the right dimension or measure it ahead of time and in compare it to the chart otherwise you're gonna basically have everything right but then go to put it on and it's not going to catch so you can actually see a visual comparison of the different thickness hoods how much shorter the spring is this would be for a 183 thickness hood which means that it's basically bringing the spring closer to the bottom of the rail because the same Zeus fastener and you know it's sitting up higher off the hood so it needs to be shorter to catch that and then this is an 83 hood foot so this would be like for your typical carbon composite style din style hood so you can see the difference in it one's gonna catch the ones not so you don't actually have to rivet this on for this to work it'll just we got it sitting in there it looks like it's going to hit this fine and you can see it just turns nice and smoothly that's how you want it to go on if it has to if you have to turn harder than that or less than that you at least want to look at the spring package or the offset of course it's easy to line the first one up so now we'll do the rest of them and see how it looks after that so again you want to make sure you're cognizant about how you're holding the pin if you write under there or right over there it's going to not line up right so I always like to just kind of retrace what I have to make sure tinton right and then hold it on the same angle here so now our line is right we're gonna set this sucker at we got 980 written here so I'm gonna try and match that and you can actually use the since we measured with these two teeth you can actually use that actually to mark your line rather than worrying about getting a pen again so kind of just scribe your own line in there now you have a crosshair to drill on so we're going to pre-drill it with a small drill then we're going to move back to the step drill and then we'll keep repeating the process this is the most important part of the drilling process is just getting your pilot right everything else hinges off of that yeah take it back off and drill it over there so the other thing you can do if you want to do quick and make sure you don't make mistakes as we can actually put a piece of tape on this right where it stops that way when you see the blue you know you're at the end of it that way that's your depth you're basically your depth stop is right there once we get to the blue we're done just basically knocking the edge off there on the bottom so they're going in smooth the absolute worst part about all this is just the hood coming on and off 40 times so even on a painted car I've actually had a painted hood and done this afterwards which is really kind of really test your patience but if you use tape like this and are really careful you can actually still install these without scratching of course this one's just in gel coat so we're not nearly as concerned so now we're gonna go ahead and drill the holes for the rivets you might want to quadruple check the direction so these holes are gonna go right through those big holes I showed you earlier so you want to make sure this is you can rotate it like 90 degrees tore that this flat is against here and if you did that you would drill a hole in the wrong spot so I need to have an extra hole in your hood especially if you're doing it on a painted hood so make sure you have this rotated correctly and make sure if you know hypothetical if you're drilling this hole make sure that big hole for clearance for the rivet is directly underneath of that otherwise you're gonna be really unhappy [Music] [Music] all right this sides all done so we'll move on the other side remember we actually put a little wedge in here to kind of hold shape otherwise that sinks down in the middle but if you didn't do that right now would be the time to either build a support support that somehow or trying to work it in the other side but to have a physical support like that is gonna be way better than trying to like push the hood and then do it cuz you'd have to push the same every time so now it's a good time to support anywhere that's not supported that you want to be supported and bowed up or contoured whenever it's done feels good to be done good drill nose that's the last one you shouldn't have to go in any order have a buddy pull on this corner it's supposed to be just smooth all the way across so now last thing we'll do is we will take our calipers will use that bottom piece like I showed you before we'll adjust the height and then we'll rivet all the bottom you know where it folds over to the fender so that's all stationary on both sides and we're done so again it's nice that we have the screws in there like I said you can just kind of take your caliper set it to the you know measure the thickness then lock this screw knob and then push this down and then basically you can just drill holes and rivet it just work your way from one side to the next the trickiest part about this is just getting the rivet tool in there so where you can actually squeeze it so I just put one about in each spot just so you can get your Heights right and then you can come back pull the screws out and then put one in the middle piece there and then one on each side so that we get a little added extra security and if you put it in a very back it allows you to kind of flex it a little bit when you go to the next one because as you know we're trying to create a curve here because the fenders aren't exactly flat from front to back whereas if you nailed it in the front you'd be working against yourself all the way down check your height somebody's can actually get a little tricky that one all right hit the bender superclass so this bumper is a little bit off right now we'll adjust that later so we'll just set this front one as if it was correct [Music] kind of going out picks real alright guys so everything is done I'm just doing one final fitment and then once we've basically decided we like the heights of the hood and the gaps and everything we'll go ahead and just nail the rest of those holes down that go into the fenders but as you can see these these fasteners just go right in so the biggest thing is these are we're in a little bit but you don't want to have to fight them all the way across just remember if you had a support kind of mocked up over there you don't want to put a support back in it because even that a little bit of flex will move the Zeus's out past the point of where they're supported now on a fox body you 100% want to secure this area if we have another Zeus package for that or it just has two of them on sliders I'll put that in the description below you definitely want to secure that area or any car where you have like a long overhang like that as soon as wind gets under that it's gonna start pulling and ripping the hood so you'll want to secure that part as well and then a lot of people end up putting them back here as well especially if it's a big arching cowl it's never a bad idea to have more Zeus's than you need if you notice I used slot style Zeus's and this is just my own opinion some people agree some won't I always like to use these rather than the hex tile the hex tile are definitely way nicer and look better and a little bit less chance of slipping off on a paint but at any given racetrack almost everybody has this style or a screw driver around so they can get the hood on or off you know if you're in a stadium lanes and something goes wrong and you're strapped in or if you're on the big end the car is you know smoke and they can get the hood off whatever it's just a lot better option in my opinion to have this then the hex drive you give up a little bit of looks and stuff like that but you end up with something that's way more functional even a quarter will work that I'm you know if you put your deuces nice so I hope this helped you guys as I said before this same principle will work on a fox-body s10 whatever it doesn't have to be a motion racial exuse rail though we prefer it is you know your general principles of laying things out and making cross marks pre drilling and then drilling the final hole doing one at a time that stuff will carry over to any brand or any style zeus that you're installing so hope this helped we will see you guys next time don't forget to subscribe down below and leave us a comment thanks [Music]

Channel: Motion Raceworks Official

Views: 28,844

Rating: 4.9405522 out of 5

Keywords: Drag, Racing, fabrication, racecars, carbon fiber, fox, body, mustang, s10, camaro, gbody, Dzus Rails, Fox body Dzus rails, fox body mustang, 79-93 Fox body, Motion Raceworks, Mustang, ford mustang, Fox body mustang, Dzus, Dzus tool, Dzus fitting, racecar, drag racing, small tire mustang, turbo mustang, mustang fiberglass hood, mustang fiberglass front clip, mustang race car, dzus rail installation, dzus fastener, how to install fiberglass hood, how to install dzus fasteners, dzus rails

Id: oCHA6Ajj0XY

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020