The owners of these models are familiar with the limitations of the original rear hinged hoods that barely lift high enough to get under and check the oil and when the hinges are worn they are worse. Try to force the hood higher and you will get a nice gouge from the rear of the hood on the top of ea. fender. Restorers may wish to skip the rest of the post since it results in altering stock components.

Since I'm rodding my 47 Convertible and will want better access to the engine bay I decided to do a forward tilting hood project. The hoods are big and clumsy to handle so I enlisted the help of a talented younger friend and experienced rod builder, Kevin Dickinson, who lives in the same area. The project took about 35 hours to get to the stage where we had the hood back on and tilting forward last night. But it still has a ways to go. I started with a Universal Fit tilt hood kit which was darn near useless. Parts were either tossed or heavily modified and lots of new parts were fabricated. Never having done a tilt hood before the kit did give me a leg up on the general layout of a tilt assembly and saved hours in that regard.

I posted some pics with captions on Picasa: https://picasaweb.google.com/jbinwa/...CKebmsb1oKqtcg

You might have to cut and paste to your browser or maybe just click on the link,

re. the Thumbnail: The grey primer panels on the inner fenders were made to hide wiring and other things that clutter up engine bays. When done, along with smoothed firewall it should look much better.

 

Looks like a fun project!!

 

Tilt hoods are a B!$#CH to set up on these older models. Make sure you have some seriously heavy duty cross supports or you run a risk of twisting the hood out of true, screwing up the alignment, and worse, ripping out the hydrolic (that doesn't look spelled right, lol) arm mounts. Ours took several attempts to set up and fab into place. I still need to get the thing lined up right. Of course, if you noticed, our hood sure isn't stock anymore either. Cut out the center and mated it with a '53 series truck. Let me know if you need any help anytime, we're not that far and we enjoy taking trips!

Good luck!

 

Spoken like someone who has been there and done that. We are still working on the details of fitting all that floppy sheet metal so the gaps are decent. I did notice your hood looked different but couldn't figure out what had been done with it other than the scoop and welding hood and fenders together. I thought about that but decided just getting the hood to tilt was enough of a job.

 

All in all man, it looks good! Keep up the hard work! You might consider running a piece of reinforment along the back of the hood. Just bend it to the curve of the hood, so it fits up and out of the way of the engine, and the connect it close to where your runners for the latch channel are. Just an idea, I still am working on stabilizing mine out. Might end up using some telescoping runner guides....