Finding the location for the Chargeport was an easy task on the Renault 4CV: The cooling water filler cap with the wings ornament is a super distinctive feature of the car that I wanted to emphasize even further in my build. On the very bottom of the picture you can see the new plastic cap of the chargeport, which of course isn’t very nice compared to the original chrome filler cap.
Of course I absolutely wanted to keep the original filler cap, so I decided to integrate the original filler cap into the cap of the chargeport, which worked out pretty nicely:
My main problem however was, that the original cutout for the water pipe was just a little bit too small to fit the chargeport. So I decided to enlarge the cutout just a few millimeters in order to fit the chargeport. This is one of the only very few modifications I made to the original substance of the car. I am still torn if it was the right decision, but in the end it turned out pretty nice. But sometimes I still regret that cut.
A first test fit on the car looks pretty OK, but now the wings ornament turned out to be a little bit too small in relation to the bigger cap and of course to the bigger cutout for the chargeport.
So the decision was made to recreate the wing ornament in a 1 to 1.2 ratio. This is how I designed it on CAD:
The CAD file was then sent to a shop with a waterjet cutting machine, where it was cut from 2 mm aluminium sheet metal. It came out pretty nice, I still haven’t decided if I will recreate the engraved channels too, as I like the clean look of the plain ornament which goes very well with the clean electric drive:
And here’s the chargeport fully assembled on the car. Despite the fact that I was afraid of changing the aspect of this very distinctive part of the car, I am happy how it turned out in the end.
Fun fact: Many people in the past mixed up the fuel filler cap on this car with the water filler cap. The fuel filler cap actually wasn’t available from the outside of the car, it was hidden under the rear bonnet which had to be opened in order to access the fuel filler. So many uninformed filling station attendant would have mistaken the water filling cap for the fuel filler, which resulted in fuel being filled into the cooling system. It really was some sort of a design flaw, which I now have corrected with my modification 😉 !
