When a cars top is chopped and left without b pillars like the below pics, are there just no side windows? I always see these with either no side gl*** or the windows rolled down. always curious about pillarless cars and side gl*** any apologies in advance if this is a dumb question. I just saw the new post about the chopped 4 door and it made me wonder.
those 2 cars have chopped down factory windows. yes there are some that are too lazy or don't know how to put windows in.. but i would say the majority of well crafted cars will have all windows.
Those are hardtops.... the top one is a belair which is factory.... if you take a post car and chop it and there is no B pillar it would have to be hardtoped or no windows at all.
That's not a dumb question; the only dumb question is the one you don't ask! Both of those cars started life as pillarless hardtops so they almost certainly have roll-up gl***. However, when you convert a coupe or sedan to a pillarless hardtop you will have to figure out how to do side gl***. Some have a rear window that slides in and out with the door open. Some of them have side gl*** that has to be rolled down a bit for the door to open and close. Personally I think that is silly and sloppy. And sometimes what looks like a hardtop is really a sedan with really thin pillars. The famous Hirohata Mercury looks like a pillarless hardtop, but the rear side gl*** is fixed in place (I believe?) and the door gl*** rolls up and down within that pretty curved chrome channel. The chrome channel stays put when the windows are down, just like the much thicker and heavier original sedan channels would have. If you look closely at the photo I've attached you'll see what I mean.
Me too. They just have to go to the time, trouble, and/or expense of doing it nicely. The more I think about it, most of the ones I've seen that looked good had the rear side gl*** fixed in place and only the door gl*** rolled up and down.
Nicely done. Was that a hardtop to begin with? Or did you use hardtop doors? The wing area looks like hardtop or convertible, not sedan/coupe.
Very, very nice cars have gl*** that rolls up or slides in place like others have said. Most of the ones I've seen on the street were 'hardtopped' by people that just didn't care about the gl*** and don't have any.
Functioning side windows are one of the various obstacles in the course of chopping the roof of a car. When chopping a car that has all the corner pillars leaning towards the center of the car, the roof loses not only length but width as well in shortening of the pillars. This can be compensated for in two ways; either re-aligning the posts (=leaning them in further), or splicing up and broadening the roof skin to have the top halves of the roof pillars meet with the remaining lower stubs of the split pillars. In case of the type of cars in Your pictures, the former method would entail the need of also freeing up and re-aligning the (roll-up) side window tracks inside of the doors and rear quarters in their lateral angle for the purpose of repositioning the (flat) side gl*** in an angle where they would still meet with the roof edge in their proper "up" -location to look and seal like they should. Obviously the latter method would eliminate the need for this, but could hardly be considered any less involved, what with splicing, broadening and re-attaching the convex roof skin... Just one of the many clusterfunks involved in chopping a car properly, and things like this are what separate really nice, well thought-out customs from mere hack-jobs. You see it done all the time though, yet this is still a detail that many don´t even happen to think of when looking at a chopped hardtop with functioning roll-up side gl*** at a show. Would You happen to have a side-angle pic of that satin-black ´53-54 Bel Air Ht, BTW? I like that. I like that a lot.
You really have to have some good skills to make hardtop windows function correctly,on a chopped car. It's even HARDER to do on a car that had b-pilars and were removed for a hardtop look. The easy way out is to cap the door tops,like this guy did...
I did mine with a channel for the rear side gl*** to slide in an out of..When i want the windows "down", I just slide the gl*** out and store it in the trunk...
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