Today's project was to resolve my hood latching. I purchased a hood latch T-handle assembly from OGTS and had to figure out where to mount it. My custom dashes stick out 2" farther than oem, so I have to put an L-bracket somewhere to anchor the handle. So, this is where it is. Not pretty, but far enough under the dash to not be very visible:
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The next mod was a real conundrum. Lenk hoods normally come as just the upper skin in fiberglass and the attachment plate to the hood hinges. No hood latching 1/4" rods and no place to put the hood prop rod. If you want all that stuff and the whole hood to be good and strong, you can swap over the underlying reinforcement metal from an oem hood and fiberglass/resin it to the Lenk hood. My other car just has the skin and some eye bolts sticking down for the hood latch bar to grab, but no place to put the prop rod. The hood on this car has the whole shebang swapped over, plus putty over the whole bottom to smooth it out and make it look nice. Lots of money invested in this hood. But, then I got the crazy idea to put a hood window in it, like my other car has, and when I was done installing it I realized that you could see the ugly unpainted, normally hidden, underside of the oem reinforcement metal that spans across the cowling area. On top of that the cowling metal blocked 1/4-1/3 of the view of the engine through the window. No sense in having a hood window if it shows ugly stuff and not as much of the engine as possible. So, I chopped out the offending section of the cowling area reinforcement metal. But, oh shucks, the 1/4" rods that the hood latch bar grabs were part of that section. I was left with a nice chromed hood latch bar and nothing for it to grab. Long story short, there were two 1" x 3" rectangular openings left behind in the reinforcement metal after I chopped out the metal and, as it turned out, if I put a metal rod in those "pockets" that spanned from one side of the hood to the other, the perfect spot to fasten the rod was in the lower rear corner of those pockets. I had a nice stainless steel rod that would do the job and it looks good through the window. The hard part was how to fasten it in place. The hood latching requires very little force, almost nothing, just enough to keep the air that rushes under the belly pan and then wants to try to escape by going up into the engine compartment, from lifting the hood. I discovered this issue one day when I drove my other car to work with it's super light fiberglass only Lenk hood, but no hood latching concept implemented. Everything was cool on the local roads, but as I entered a highway and hit 50mph the hood started slowly rising up like Poseidon rising from the sea. Aaagghhh! Suddenly I couldn't see the road because the hood was sticking up about a foot and there were cars all around me! Aaaaggghhh! I couldn't grab the hood out the window to hold it down, so I had to drive down the highway in heavy traffic with my head out the window until I got to my exit. Just something the strength of a rubber band would have held it down. So, not much force needed to keep the hood latched. I pondered how to anchor that hood-spanning rod for many months, it's in an inconvenient place, I didn't install the hood window until after the car was painted, otherwise I would have dealt with this issue while I was doing bodywork before painting. I want to avoid drilling and bolting it in place for various reasons, so I have decided to passively anchor it with Goop glue. The pics are of the assemblage waiting for the glue to dry. Later, I will fill the pockets with specially shaped wood blocks or rubber hoses or something that will apply constant pressure to the rod to keep it from coming loose. It may fail, if so I'll just have to come up with a better idea.
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