Adventures in and around the HOOD

[DonImbimbo]

I thought I would document some of the issues I had with the Grill Cowl, Hood, and Hood Hinges.

Grill Cowl

It took very little sanding to get the top edge fitting to the grill using the 1/4 inch nylon spacers under the cowl mount. And the bottom half of the cowl fit pretty good to the grill. However, I had huge gaps in the upper half of the cowl, 1/4 inch on the left side and 5/16 on the right side. I sent pictures to Tech Support and the reply was that "there should be plenty material to trim". The only way to close these gaps was to either bring the top edge forward or add material to the sides.

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I'm not confident enough in my fiberglass abilities to add material to such a thin part so I went down the route of trimming the top edge. Of course as you trim the top edge you also LOWER the top. And eventually the 1/4 inch nylon spacers had to be removed completely.

After all that, I still had a very small gap left side and 1/8 on the right. So I covered those areas on the grill with clear packing tape and roughed up the edges of the cowl and smeared in some Bondo Glass Short Strand. This worked well.

Next issue was as you lower the top of the grill cowl I wound up with extra material under the chin area. So I cut off the upward facing fiberglass flaps plus an extra 1/4 inch off of each side. I then made two right angle brackets with rivnuts.

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This approach has the benefit of making the cowl really easy to remove, two bolts at the top and four underneath.

Lowering the grill cowl had negative consequences. Read about the hinges below.

Hood

One thing I noticed about the hood right away is that its length measured 35 3/4 at the center and between the cab and the grill cowl I had 36 inches. I was planning on a 1/8 gap at the rear and 3/16 at the front. So I had only 1/16 of trimming to do at the center. Turns out there was just a bit more to trim in front of the wipers. So for the most part it fit pretty nice.

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As others have found, the front corners of the hood were "pinched" inward against the cowl. So I braced the inside of the grill cowl with a 2 x 2 from left to right and forced the hood corners out with wedges. I then used a heat gun to warm the corners. I was surprised how much heat it took to get these to move. I used about 300 - 325F surface temperature.

Hinges

Lowering the grill cowl created an interference between the cowl and the hinge brackets, which I suspected was going to happen. There is an exploded view of the hinge assembly in the build manual. This did not work for me. I had to put the Right hinge bracket on the LEFT side. And I have seen pictures of other builds where they did the same.

I also had to put the Hinge Arm to the INSIDE of the bracket, between the bracket and the radiator.

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Next issue was aligning the hinge arm to the bracket mounted to the hood. A quick look at this area shows that the angle at the end of the hinge arm does NOT align to the bracket. I figured they were off by 11 degrees. So I "un-bent" the end of the arm by this amount and it was just about perfect.

Here was my layout on the hood bracket.

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Remember, these holes get tapped for 1/4-20 because of embedded aluminum.

One other note, because of what I did with the hinge mounts on the radiator I had to elongate the slots in the hood brackets by 1/4 inch.

Prop Rod

The prop rod is straight forward. But one thing to note. In the build manual they show mounting the prop rod at the center of the hood. If you follow this procedure you can't mount the hood striker there as they show on previous pages.

I'm not planning on using the hood latch so I mounted the prop rod at center.

And you so have to cut down the length of the rod. I think I chopped off about 1 1/2 inches. It's stainless so use and angle grinder.

I mounted the rod bracket to the hood with Qty 3 - 10-32 screws into two rivnuts and one tapped hole into the aluminum. BTW - to find the edge of the aluminum use a conventional wall stud finder, works great!

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Summary

All in all I'm happy with how it turned out. The gaps are looking pretty good so far and the hinges are working fine.

I think I will have to trim (remove) the lower edge of the hood, below the body line, when I work on the engine side covers. I have already started that process.