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hood mods...

jekbrown

jekbrown

I am CK5
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My rig is going truggy, but I'd like to keep my factory hood. The plan was to narrow the hood and cut the length down also because I wanted to pull back the radiator/fan etc to make room for my winch. Sorta like narrowing the front fenders... but I ain't gonna run any. :grin:

Anyway, I wanted it to look factory, so I couldn't trim off the front of the hood so it had to be the back. To accomplish this, I decided that it might work to mount the hood to the factory hinges... but to use the forward-most bolt hole in the hood and bolt it to the rear most hole in the hinge... this makes the hood sit 5" further back than stock...

hood_1.jpg


There is another hole in the hood (from the stock springs) that I am going to use, but for now its held by 1 bolt on each side. Seemed to work...

hood_3.jpg


hood_2.jpg


as you may be able to tell, the hood slopes down more than stock also... oughta help with the view from the driver's seat. More sheetmetal will be cut off to make it narrower... I just made a cut to the ridge in the hood to start with.

Here is what I chopped off...

hood_4.jpg


I'll post more pics tomorow as I make more progress...

j
 
what? no love for some hood choppin'? tough audience these days! Me thinks Bgreen and Willywanter have raised the bar to the point where amateurs like me get no posts in my threads. lol! :grin:

j
 
what? no love for some hood choppin'? tough audience these days! Me thinks Bgreen and Willywanter have raised the bar to the point where amateurs like me get no posts in my threads. lol! :grin:

j
Click to expand...

hehe, thats wat i thought when i posted my junk---us bottom feeders gotta stick togather----looks good. the sloped hood will definately help in the visibility.
 
looks great Jek.

I'm narrowing my toyota when I do the motor swap. I'm trying to find a hood scoop that matches the body style that is as wide as the motor so I can drop the nose down farther. I'm taking 9" per corner.
 
jekbrown said:
Me thinks Bgreen and Willywanter have raised the bar
Click to expand...

Yea,these guys (and some others) turn out some awsome work.


Your hood looks spiffy to me. Will you use pins for the front?
 
Right now the hood retains its stock latching capability... I didn't remove anything from the front and it still rotates about the factory hinges. What I'll probably end up doing is using a pin at each corner and the factory latch just to help support everything. The more sheetmetal you remove from a stock hood, the floppier it gets. There will be a 1.75" tube "halo" that will follow the hood around its entire perimeter and attach to the firewall. I'll be able to mount pins and maybe some type of ledge/support things off of it to firm everything up.

I should have taken another pic from the side to show how much shorter front to back the hood is now. Tons of peeps have chopped the corners off their hoods, but I haven't seen any shorten them and look decent... that was the "nifty" part of what I did and you can't really see it in the pics. I'll get more today when its sunny out. Right now, the hood doesn't even reach the front body mounts (which is fine, because I won't be using them!).

Plan right now is to get it narrowed as much as I want, use panel adhesive + a few well placed rivets to firm everything up, add hoodpins and then eventually (after the cage is done) Line-X the whole hood which will further stiffen it, make it easier to maintain and cover up my crappy fab skills. ;)

j
 
55Willy said:
I'm narrowing my toyota when I do the motor swap.
Click to expand...

yikes... isn't a toyota narrowed from the factory? :grin: you'll really be able to shoehorn that rig pretty much anywhere if you narrow it... pretty cool. :thumb:

j
 
Nice work Jek. Is that as much as you are narrowing it? I like it like that more than the super narrowed jobs as it blends with the full width cab better I think. Cool project keep us posted. Back to work on my cheap bumper:D
 
Looks good but I'm not sure I see the point of using the factory hood when you're ditching the rest of the front clip. Then again I don't know your plans for the tube work so I could be way off base here. In any event it looks cool. :waytogo:
 
awesome. I'll have more factory hood than the pics of 85muddin's shown above... but less than what you see in the first pics I posted. Since I am keeping my firewall and windshield there isn't much point in cutting much more off the back side... the hood is already narrower there than the windshield frame is. I've already cut more off the front corners today though. The front can be as narrow as the radiator / fans allow really. Basically, where I have it cut now is just about even with the outside edge of the front leaf spring hanger. I want the rig to look good, but at the same time the things/places I cut need to make sense from a functional standpoint. I could make the whole rig a lot narrower by ditching the windshield etc... but I like driving a big rig and the front/rear bobbing/narrowing will keep it big in the cab area by allow me to squeeze through tight trail corners and stuff a lot easier than my full bodies K5 would have. It will definitely look a lot sexier when the tube work is done...

I'll post pics before the day is through. I've got the factory hinges drilled / bolted to the hood spring bolt holes etc. Its pretty much mounted how I want it... just need to stiffen it up a bit and do some finishing work once the tube is in place.

btw muddin... do you ever worry that a rock might have a meeting with your radiators side tank thingies?

j
 
Yea I have thought about it, but it would have to be that perfect rock to do it.
When I rolled it the bends that go around it saved the radiator so the only thing I really have to worry about is if say I flopped it on a perfect pointy rock.

One of these days I will add a little protection to it, its just hard because w/e I add has to be removable since to get my radiator out you can only slide it out the sides.
Well I guess I only need to make one side removable.HMMMM
 
That looks like it will work good :). It's kind of a pain to pull a bunch of pins just to check the tranny fluid:laugh: . On a side note, I run without the hood if it's not gonna downpour, you get a wee bit more visibility looking through the tube steel. Have fun.
 
Here are some more progress pics of my little hood project. Like I said before, I planned on narrowing it more up front. Here is what she looks like from the front now...

hood_10.jpg


and here is an "after" pic of the stock hood hinges. The stock springs offered me a factory bolt hole, so I just lined it up and drilled a new hole through the hinge and put the factory bolt right back in. Works like a charm.

hood_12.jpg


The ends are floppy now that I cut off the edges, but it will firm back up when I use the panel adhesive and/or rivets to reattach the hood skin to the factory support members and then Line-X it.

From above you can see how I trimmed the back. It turned out pretty well I think, and from any distance the line looks factory. I used my snifty digital caliper (yes, its from HF) to cut exactly 5" off the back of the hood. Because the back of the hood is curved, I used a sharpie and marked 5" every 2 or 3" along the entire cut. From there it was a simple matter of holding my 4.5" grinder/cuttoff wheel steady.

hood_11.jpg


angled shot...

hood_13.jpg


and lastly, one from the side. This shows how much less the hood sticks out than it did before and how much it slopes down. Without cutting a hole for the brake resevoir (or moving it?) The hood couldn't angle down much further. I could try that, but frankly, its going to be quite a bit better than stock as it is so I'm not really worried about it.

hood_14.jpg


more to come when I get ahold of a pop rivet gun thingy and/or add tube work...

j
 
Looks real nice. are you going to cut the front off at all? To bring it in closer the where the radiator is?
 
85, I topped your truggy thread and harrassed you for some measurements. :p:

Lookin' good Jek, what are your end plans?
 
Looks real nice. are you going to cut the front off at all? To bring it in closer the where the radiator is?
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No, thats not the final resting place of the radiator... it'll be closer to the hood, I justed pushed/leaned it back that far to keep it out of the way. :) I don't like cramped engine bays, so it will probably be just behind the front of the hood, and nearly vertical. I have windstar electric fans ready to mount behind it once the tube work is attached.

Lookin' good Jek, what are your end plans?
Click to expand...

For just the hood or the whole rig? lol! Basically it'll be truggified with lots of tube, FI'd 350, reverse manual Th400 with Art Carr shifter, 203/205 WMS doubler with NWF retainers and tripple shifters, HAD shafts, D60/ff14b with 5.13s, Yukon 4340s, Yukon super joints, disc brakes and detroits. ATOR flanges up front... 39.5x15x15 TSLs for now, but the final tire size will be 42" TSLs once I make my 39.5s bald :grin: . I like the jungle gym look, so expect to see lots of tube. Dash will be custom, and definitely "project freak" inspired. Seats are Corbeau Baja SS... fuel cell is Summit aluminum. Floor plates and flip will be all DIY. Either 56s or 63s in back for springs... 56s up front. Warn 8274 winch with synth line. WFO TR/DL, WTO hydro assist... though I may go PSC full hydro at some point. The list goes on. Cool thing is I have 95% of the stuff listed above... just need to get the tube and finish the job. Not a bad equipment list considering how little I make at work. ;)

j
 
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