Gary's 2 442-S

I just wanted to share my experience in lining up my hood on my 68 442.
First of all, once I put the hinges on and once I tightened the drives side down I notice the rear bolt would not snug up it kept on spinning. So at this point I knew the bolt hole was stripped. So I removed the hinge and tried to put a helicore in there and it would not work. The fender housing was just to shallow to support the helicore. So to address this issue I decided to weld a square nut on the back side of the fender. I didn't have to remove the fender to do so., I just removed the inner fender wells and took the tires off and I had access to weld the square nuts on the backside of the the hood fender bracket/housing.. So at this point I decided that I would weld a square nut on each of the access points on both fenders just in case another one stripped.

So once I did this I put the hinges back on and left them loose so I could adjust the hood properly. Get the hood on and I try to adjust it and no matter what I did I could not get the hood to align. properly. Spent many hours trying to do so but was not having any luck. So I started searching the site and found a post referring to the hinge being bent. I could not tell that the hinges were bent from the naked eye but I knew something had to be wrong because that hood would not align.

I saw another post referring a company that would rebuild the hinges. I was just going to buy a repo set but in my finding I found there are no repo for a 68. So I decided to call ******* Hinge Repair. He told me that there was a good possibility that the hinge or both might be bent. I sent them off to him and he rebuilt them and straightened them. He said they were bent and he fixed them and put new rivets on the hinge. Turn around time was about 4 weeks. Once I got them back I painted them. He had advised that I use a Lubricant called Sea Foam Creep.

I get the hood back on and I close it and align every thing up with the hinges loose and not tight. Once the hood was in place where I wanted it I tightened the hinge down from the bottom. I had access to the bolts from underneath because the wheel wells are out. I got this idea from another member on here and boy did that work. Now one thing that I found out is that it is imperative to place those spacers to the rear where the hood sits on the hinge. It makes a big difference in the alignment and also its in the assembly manual to place those 2 spacers.

I now have a hood that is properly aligned. Also I did not have to replace the springs. Hopefully this helps someone. because this worked for me.

droldsmorland

Interesting tx for passing along your experience. I too struggled with 2, 68 hoods. I had to leave out both of the thick horseshoe spacers at the rear to get the rear of the hood to close flush with the rear of the fenders. I went so far as to slightly elongate the adjustment slots in the hinges to get the rear of the hinge to lay down deeper...more adjustment. I wonder if the hinges were simply bent throughout the years?