[Dan Case]

Not proof on every car for sure but I have tried various original covers, tops, and side curtain sets on CSX2310 from chassis CSX2259 up to CSX3298 and they all fit just exactly the same. Several owners that I know of have tried several tops and covers each on their cars, usually making upgrades from poor condition to better condition ones. Other than the difference in middle snaps between Cobras and 427 Cobras fitments I have seen or been told about have been very consistent BUT these involve parts and cars that have never been seriously damaged or modified or had their skins removed from where AC Cars put them.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a fairly common practice of welding up the stud holes during car rebuilds or just even repaints so that all the ripples and dents around the typical stud could be worked out. Once the body work was smooth new holes were drilled. Another thing to consider is that very many original cars have had their skins removed and reinstalled during repairs and rebuilds. Some shops mark the skins so they can be put back exactly where they originally were; in extreme cases they carefully drill rivets so they may rewrap the aluminum and use the original holes. Many other places just pull the skins off, weld up all the holes in tubes and aluminum, and put the skins back in some location original or not. I have seen one shop that use to trim most of the aluminum the wraps around tubes off and just weld on new wide strips so they have plenty of fresh material to work with. I seriously doubt these shops get the skins just exactly where they were and how you install a skin that already has holes in it can affect final hole locations a lot in all those compound curves of the rear cowl. Take for example the aluminum left fender on my car trailer. I snagged the fender on some shrubbery and pulled the leading end off. The first three sheet metal screws pulled out of the side wall. The fender was damaged but not creased. I straightened the aluminum out, didn’t leave any noticeable marks on it, but now the screw holes in the fender did not line up with the holes in the side wall anymore because of the slight plastic deformation of the fender during getting damaged and straightened. My solution for the problem was to make the holes the next size larger. If that had been a Cobra skin the top studs would have changed location just a little.

I looked at a CSX22XX car that the owner used locking pliers to jerk the studs out because he didn’t want to take the fuel tank out. The body shop had to fix all the conical volanco shaped holes and drill new ones before paint. I bet the body shop didn’t get the new holes exactly in the original locations.

I personally would be suspicious of an original 1960s car with its holes not where most cars have them. It may mean that car has some unpublished (not everything is in the SAAC Registries) history like the car with less than 1,500 miles I looked at in the mid 1980s? The car was at a well known shop. It was seriously crashed in 1965 by the original owner. The car was crashed and stored in the owner’s garage for the next twenty years before being rebuilt. The chassis required a large amount of repairs including new metal in various places, a replacement body (not an AC Cars skin), all new inner panels, and significant numbers of other replacement parts to replace ones damaged in the crash. I got to see the car in various phases of this work. It looked really nice when done but not much original was left. It was sold at auction for a very high price advertised as a one owner extremely low mile absolutely correct untouched original. It was a one owner car when it went up for sale and it did have low miles but everything else about the advertisement was untrue. Significant portions of what was original went into the trash but unless you visited that shop and watched the car change from mangled mess to auction show piece you might think it was just done differently by AC Cars as an exception.

So many of these old cars were so abused most are not very close to the way they were in the 1960s much less the way they were when new. Originality has become an ‘eye of the beholder’ topic.