The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Front clip alignment to fit hood

I've tried again and again to follow the instructions for fitting the hood to the fenders on my 1950 3100 that is posted on SB but am unable to get the hood to fit between where the radiator support mounts to the fenders forward.

How do you widen this location when the width it set where the factory holes are by the fender braces etc.?

Better yet does anyone know of someone in the Kansas City metro area that works on the early 50's trucks that I could contact?

Thanks

There are a several fellow Bolters in the KC metro area that have AD trucks like yourself. Not to mention a bunch of folks that belong to the Genuine Chevy/GMC Truck Club of KC that also own and work on their AD trucks. I'm a Bolter and a Truck Club member. If you aren't in a big rush to get to this, we could try to get together to see what might be figured out to resolve your problems. Send me a PM or an email (look at my profile for that) and we can discuss further.

In the mean time, please post some pics of your front fenders, radiator support and hood fit as they could prove useful in identifying what may be going on. Folks can take a look and possible see whats going on and offer helpful hints and tips.

I had a similar situation with a replacement radiator support. What i did was insert some washers between the radiator support and the inner fenders to push them outward. You might give that a try.

Looking forward to see some pics of this problem, for I have had a similar issue with my truck's hood to fender fitment, for many years.

"Instructions for fitting the hood to the fenders on my 1950 3100 that is posted on SB"

You will be chasing your tail to attempt to fit the hood to the fenders.

Step one: Fit the hood to the cowl and the hood latch, then do not touch the hood ever again.

Step two: Adjust everything else to fit under the hood.

This may appear to be an oversimplification of the complex procedure of lining up the front clip, but it is imperative to completely separate steps one and two.

It is not uncommon to run into "special" challenges during Step Two. The procedure to which you are referring does not include all of the potential "special" challenges. That would have drug the tech tip too far into weeks, leaving it less useful as a guide.
Feel free to PM me once you have the hood completely adjusted, or before that if you have trouble adjusting the hood. I can hopefully walk you through it and help you git-r-done.

As CLSnMO was having a tough time resizing his pics to fit, here are resized pics he emailed me of his truck hood and fender fitment for posting here to try and figure out his dilemma. Hope these pics will help.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like your hood needs to go back towards the cab some little bit.

My thoughts on the first pic is that the hood nose needs to go down a bit, assuming it's sitting on the bumpers on the grill. The gap between hood and cowl needs to be even all the way down to the corner. Radiator support shim may need to be thinner. Second pic doesn't look bad though.

Nice paint job, BTW.

I think the hood is where it should be. It lines up with the hood latch hole and it's about 1/8' - 3/16" from the cowl at the top center of the hood. The gapping of the hood is where it stops when it is hitting the fender. So it is up somewhat as you look at it. If we are talking about shimming etc where will this be done specifically? I cannot get any wider where the fender, inner fender and fender support all bolt together. This to me is somewhat of a static spot that doesn't allow much for movement outwards away from the radiator support. Where are adjustments to be made what holes do I need to waller out? Can't never did anything I know but standing around looking doesn't help much either.

If you remove the vertical bolts at the top of the radiator support that go through the support, inner fender, and brace (under the inner fender) you should be able to space the inner fender away from the radiator support as suggest by Kevin. Once you get the spacing you want you can see what is required to install the vertical bolts that were removed.

It is also possible that your fenders are too high closing the gap with the hood, if the hood is tight against the bumpers in the latch support you could try to lower the fenders by loosing the vertical bolts and making the horizontal bolts from the inner fender to the radiator support loose enough to push then fenders lower. I belelive the holes in the inner fenders are slotted to allow some adjustment. As noted in the Tech Tip procedure the idea is to get the hood in place and then raise the fenders to adjust the gap to the hood. If yoru fenders are too high they need to be lowered and then brought back up to meet the bumpers on the underside of the hood.

Ok looking at extending the holes on the inner & outer fenders so they spread away from the radiator support more that they presently can.

I have had to do that before, but I also had to add washers to shim between the side of the radiator support and the fenders at the same time.

My hood was similar when trying to get it to have proper gap between the hood and the cowl. If your hood is latched and your alignment with the front corners of the hood and fenders is pretty close. I put shims between the radiator support and frame raising the radiator support vertically. That corrected a good bit of the wide gap that I encountered.
I will admit my hood is still not where I would like it on the driver side. We all know that this adjustment is super frustrating.