Supporting Hinge Arrangement for Heavy Weight Side Opening Tailgate 2014-01-0352

The tailgate is the fifth or the rearmost door of an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle)[1]. It can be side opening or top opening. It is attached to the BIW (Body In White) with two hinge arrangement. The hinges are designed to take the cantilever load of a normal side opening tailgate along with the passenger ingress/egress load. This means that apart from the doors own weight, the hinges have to take the extra load which a passenger exerts on it by resting his/her forehand on the handle. The hinges are designed to take these loads and under normal circumstances, they do not fail for acceptable number of cycles of opening and closing of the tailgate. But in case of an armored vehicle side opening tailgate, it is quite a challenge for the normal hinges to take the heavy load of the tailgate along with passenger ingress / egress load. The normal hinges (Refer figure-1) obviously fail under such heavy loads either in their design or material configuration. To take this extra load, designers had to think of an innovative arrangement/concept that was simple yet convenient from retrofitting point of view on an armored vehicle configuration. Such an innovation was thought off, designed and implemented successfully on first prototype of the armored SUV.