The Hood - Round 2, 3 & 4

I know, I am anxious to get the body painted too but we can't paint with candy color unless the car is fully assembled, otherwise the paint is likely to mismatch between components.  Everything has to be painted at the same time.

 I set the 63 hood on the car and noticed it didn't fit as well as I thought it should.  It was then that I realized it was the 67 hood that we fit to the car last year.  So, without bolting the 63 hood down and spending a lot of time shimming to verify fit, I decided to just go ahead and work on both hoods at the same time.  If one doesn't fit the way we want, the other one will.  Lets hope the 63 will be fine.

The hood didn't need any Bondo but there were several areas that needed a little help.  I decided to squeegee on the Icing filler.  I did small sections at a time since there is only about 3 minutes of working time per batch.

After the entire hood was done (less the cookie sheet areas) I hand sanded everything using several different sanding blocks until the hood was smooth to the touch.  The white spots are filling very shallow nicks and gouges that were made with the grinder and scraper when we removed the paint.

I sprayed the hood with two part epoxy primer then...

I decided to smooth the cookie sheet areas even though they get covered up.  I applied Icing ...

then sprayed a contrasting primer so I could start the guide coat process.

Yes, I am doing both hoods at the same time.

Guide Coat takes a lot of time, especially when it's all done by hand.  If you look in the cookie sheet areas you can see there are still low areas (red spots).

So I  squeegeed the Icing and filled in those areas too.

I primered again for the second time.

Sprayed contrasting primer ...

Then did a second Guide Coat.  You can see there are very few areas where I sanded through the primer.  That means the surface is getting super smooth and super flat.

I primered the hood again for the third time.  All the hood needs now is a quick sanding then it's ready for primer sealer.  But before I do that I'll let this thing dry for a good week.

All this attention to the hoods is excessive and I know it.  A body shop would have been able to do something comparable in a 10th of the time.  Fortunately, I am not a body shop and I don't care if I am being excessive.  Besides, the attention to the hood matches the attention Ty and I gave to the body.  At least I am consistent.

I have 7 quarts of various paint on order and it's all for the "paint job".  But before we do that we have to do the underside of the hood, both headlight buckets and the rear exhaust valance.

Thanks for watching!

The Hood

Over the last year we have spent many hours repairing this 1963 hood.  The hood was bought locally and it had lots of issues.  Not only had it been in a head-on collision, the tow company used a reciprocating saw to remove the hood from the wreckage.  It was ugly.

Over the last few weeks I've been working on both sides of the hood.  This includes grinding, fiberglassing and sand blasting.  All the work was structural, nothing cosmetic. 

You can see some repairs made to the top of the hood... 

But most of the repairs were made to the underside.  There were many cracks and holes all of which needed attention.  This is a representative repair that was stuffed, plugged, ground then later laminated with fresh fiberglass.  There were several of these.

This was a soft edge that needed to be built up then ground down to restore the edge. 

When the repairs were complete it was off to the sandblaster to remove more of the old paint.  200 pounds of sand were used in total.

It turned out nice.  In this picture there are at least a dozen repairs.  It's looking good.

Here's the fuzzy hood I mentioned in the last post.  It's paint remover hard at work.  It removed about 70% of the old paint, the remainder required sandblasting and hours and hours of hand sanding. 

It took a long time to get to this stage.  The good news is the hood is structurally sound and I have no issues using this hood on our 63 Corvette.

The bad news is we haven't  even started the finish work... Bondo, green primer, block sanding, etc.   

Thanks for watching.