The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Hood headache - need help.

Spent most of yesterday adjusting valves, timing, etc. and got the engine started after it's 6 or 7 year rest. Had a little glitch, when I had a rubber cap over the filter return line to the crankcase. It got blown off and about a quart of oil dumped thru the fitting. I didn't think there'd be that much pressure but was mistaken. After cleanup, since a couple of friends were over to observe, I put them to work installing the hood.

We followed the instructions in the service manual, with the gap even and pretty good, but when we put the support springs on things went bad. After two restarts, wound up with the following result (pics below.) Passenger side looks pretty good, but the hood sticks out away from the cowl. The driver's side gap grew quite a bit, and got a chip in the paint on the cowl near the bottom.
It looks like the hood is too far toward the passenger side, but was pretty well centered when we were tightening the hinge bolts. It's possible the hinges were tweaked, as half of the hood was replaced sometime earlier in the truck's life.

Any advice from the collective? We used a bit of caulk for sealant between the hinges around the bolt holes as the FAM directs, but maybe that's keeping the hinges from moving freely when re-positioning the hood.

Looks like my hood. I gave up trying to fix it and didn't install the springs - I have a hood prop instead.

After 4 more adjustment attempt with the driver's side hinge, I'm invoking the Russian spy Boris Gudenov ("good enough"). It's a little close at the bottom, but I'm leaving that for another day. I may work on the cowl there sometime in the future. Not sure I can adjust the driver's side hinge upward to fix that. At one point I had it so high that the hood didn't even touch the seal at the rear. Maybe the easiest fix is grinding the edge of the hood down a bit and touch up the paint.
Here's before and after pics.

I've had the same thing happen, Kevin...especially on the driver's side. You can grind the edge of the hood a bit or you can grind the area below it a bit...or both. This all has to do with your hinge and basically it has to move backward and then it has to twist upward a bit. Devilish difficult to explain and you can toss all the manuals back into the bookcase for another day. The bottom line is you probably don't have quite the freedom you want, either. You might want to just stop where you have it there and remove a bit of metal. That's what I had to do finally. I got about 1.5~2mm of clearance and left it at that. Good luck!

I have struggled with my hood install as noted elsewhere.I ended up removing the hinge bolts and cleaning all of the sealing materials off the bolts and out of the holes/slots to get as much flexability as I could get. Mine is still not great and may go at it again but my primary problem is the passenger side fender alignment with the hood. My only advantage is it is in primer and not painted at this time.

I used Carl's procedure (not the book) and it really is important to follow the steps exactly as they are written, including when to install the springs and tighten/install the hinge mounting bolts.

Another vote for the Carl method.

RonR

I think my issue was the crappy cowl panels that I replaced. Even though I used a cardboard template from the hood to match the profile, it was a bit off.

I had the same issue with both sides after replacing the cowl panels. I had to cut the cowl down at the "hood line" an 1/8 inch and bend the existing metal down to it so the hood wouldn't hit. With your paint job your probably well past the stage of wanting to do that. I did consider trying to take it off the hood instead but that seemed harder. Again not a good position to be in after paint. When I paint and reassemble mine it would not surprise me one bit if I have the same or more issue all due to the hinges being slightly off from the last time installed. Good luck

Far be it from me to throw stones at this juncture, but this is why it is really important to tack weld, or better yet, use small self-tapping screws to hold the new cowl panels in place, then install the hold and adjust it to make sure that your cowl panels are right for a good hood fit. If it doesn't fit, in will be easy enough to make adjustments to cowl panels to make it right.
I only bring this up now in order for the next guy to have a chance to read this and avoid this kind of problem on their build.