One of the most popular hot rod and custom styling tricks is to shave the handles off doors and trunks. Rodders and customizers have been doing it for years and generally replace the handles with solenoids to operate the latches electrically. When that is done, doors have no problem opening outward. Trunks, on the other hand, have gravity holding the decklids in place, making them difficult to open. If you are lucky the tip of your fingers will fit under the lower edge, and if careful, you can slowly open them enough to get your hand under it. It’s definitely a pain, but the smooth decklid is worth the trouble.
The crew at Gearhead Enterprises, Inc., have gone through that scenario a few times and decided to come up with a device that can pop the trunk open enough to get your hand under the edge of the decklid, making it very easy to open. Gearhead simply calls it a trunk popper. This unit was basically made for fiberglass cars with lightweight decklids. However, we found that it works fine with small steel decklids. The best part about the popper is that anyone with regular hand tools can install one in about an hour. We’ll show you how we installed one in the trunk of a ’30 Model A Ford coupe.
