"Eberle-Hills-Cop" (Eberle-Hills-Cop)
12/12/2016 at 09:22 • Filed to: None
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"Eberle-Hills-Cop" (Eberle-Hills-Cop)
12/12/2016 at 09:22 • Filed to: None | 1
| 7 |
Doing lots of prep for the 2017 rallycross season here in New England, which begins in a month or so. Replacing all the leaky gaskets & boots, rewiring some gauges, and surely some more stuff will pop up as I tinker...
BUT today’s task, hood pins. I don’t trust the janky factory hood latch so much anymore as it doesn’t always want to latch on the first 3 tries. I picked up a sparco hood pin set & am planning on installing tonight. But I’m also a scaredy pants about drilling the hood, so I’m calling upon the collective experience here for any tips/advice on tackling it. It seems simple enough but I have a full work day between now and then so figured I would ask!
gawdzillla
> Eberle-Hills-Cop
12/12/2016 at 09:37 |
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why not Aerocatch ?
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Eberle-Hills-Cop
> gawdzillla
12/12/2016 at 09:44 |
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significantly more cutting & cost. I did consider them however.
TheTurbochargedSquirrel
> Eberle-Hills-Cop
12/12/2016 at 09:46 |
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Find a solid point underneath and mount the posts first. Bonus if you can line it up with some of the structure on the bottom of the hood (a lot of cars have rubber stoppers under the hood which make good locations). Next you want to determine how you want to mark for drilling. The couple times I have done it we have used the top of the posts to create marks on the bottom of the hood (carefully dropping the hood on the posts from about 1 inch or so, structure under the hood can help prevent damage to the hood skin). Then drill (step bits work great, you want a hole slightly larger than the post), if you have some structure and want to be careful you can drill just the structure to see if it lines up before attacking the hood skin. Once you have your holes close the hood and use the post and holes to locate the reinforcement plates so you can drill the required holes for mounting those.
You want to use painters tape or the like to help protect the paint and you want to clean the holes as needed after drilling.
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TheTurbochargedSquirrel
> TheTurbochargedSquirrel
12/12/2016 at 10:05 |
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Other things: you are going to want something like a spring or lump of rubber to take the slack out of the hood and hold it against the pins, otherwise the hood just flops around making a ton of noise and probably denting itself. My dad’s XR4Ti just used the spring from the factory release to hold the hood up.
Also strength isn’t the reason hood pins are required for motorsport. The factory latches are actually rather strong. The big issue is that you can’t release factory latches from outside the car making it rather hard for a marshal to get into the engine compartment with a fire extinguisher. They also have the benefit of still working after you center punch a tree.
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Eberle-Hills-Cop
> TheTurbochargedSquirrel
12/12/2016 at 10:28 |
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Thanks for the protips! hopefully i can just re-use the location for the rubber feet & posts at the corners, that’ll make it easier I hope.
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TheTurbochargedSquirrel
> Eberle-Hills-Cop
12/12/2016 at 10:38 |
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If you can manage to drill the rubber stoppers without destroying them (I honestly forget how large the stoppers are on these, they may not even be big enough) you can put them around the post to keep the hood against the pin to keep it from flopping around.
Morris Levy
> Eberle-Hills-Cop
03/21/2017 at 15:20 |
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Nice picture. Looks familiar... ;-)