Bought a T2 hood for a project and the hood has 3 of the 4 bolts broken inside the hood since the PO used the steel hood bolts in the aluminum hood.

I'm tempted to get some heavy duty self tapers screws and just ram it on through the old bolts but now I'm thinking of drilling them out and putting the stock bolts back in.

Now my dilemma is I need to know what the stock thread pitch and size of the bolt is so I can run over to HomeDepot.

Also if anyone has any ideas better than drilling out let me know.

 

If you have the one good bolt, go to HD, check the metric nuts
and you'll find the size needed.
I know Lowe's has a board with all the nuts attached so it's easy to find the correct
size with trial and error.

After reading, maybe you don't have the OE bolt. M8x1.25?

 

hinge to hood is 6x1.0 thread, and i don't have my notes, but i think the threaded part is 15mm long.

 

Please, tell me more about the special bolts.

 

I was thinking the same thing

 

no such thing, the hinges change depending on Alumi or steel bonnet, or they would have been different from the factory, but i think now you get the AL ones.

i think its in the service manual, but when there is a steel part bolted to aluminum, they will do something to keep it from corroding.

the latch is different too, it takes a different spring to get the cast iron hood to pop up

 

Wasn't there a ground strap or something?
I did nothing special when I swapped in the alloy and have yet to suffer for the omission.

The spring is the only difference, everything else is identical. If, like me, you started with a steel hood and moved to aluminum, Ace Hardware Racing can supply a lighter spring, should you deem it necessary.

 

no ground strap. i suppose if you waited 50 years there might be some white stuff between the hinge and the bolt, but yeah its not really a problem.

it is a little odd because the FC doesn't seem to have a problem, but a british car would :headscratch:

 

Well I bought the hood and 1 bolt was already broken inside and the other two were severely rusted I tried spraying it to ease it out and it didn't work. They just snapped off. I took a closer look and they were severely rusty in the threaded part.

Edit: I just assumed they were different bolts as i have never had a rust hood bolt. And he did have it on an NA coupe

 

Did you know that Austin Healey 3000 bodies (which are steel and aluminum...actually, aluminium, since we're talking Britain...) were made off site and shipped-unpainted- to the factory, where they were stored uncovered outside till production began.
They were literally already corroding before paint was applied.

This seemingly lackadaisical approach to rust was not seen as a bug but rather, a feature.
A few years after purchase, just as the "new car" bloom begins to wither, the intrepid British owner was guaranteed many hundreds of hours of quality, "hands on" fettling of his baby...time in the shed/lockup far away from the nagging wife and lackwit children.

Look at the recommended maintenance schedule for a Brit car and you'll find "replace floorpans" right after the second sparkplug service.
Which is usually around Day Five.

 

A little anti seize should stop any issue between the dissimilar metals. I went to an aluminium hood, no issues with my steel bolts.

 

the italians had the british beat! i was reading about structural foam, and people kept saying it made the car rust, and digging deeper. Alfa romeo decided to foam the then new Alfasud, which is fine, but they used open cell foam, which like a sponge, holds water.

then, they used recycled steel from russia.

so basically they used rusty steel and then filled it with wet sponges.

apparently the cars were rusty in the showrooms!

the modern structural foams are closed cell, so they keep water out, rust isn't a problem

 

So I decided to go to Classic auto body near me to get it done. And I realized that the passenger side threaded part ( the metal bracket inside the hood that has the threads for the bolts) is loose. Is there anyway it can be salvaged ? The one bolt hole doesn't even line up now.

 

That captured plate is supposed to be loose, it's all the hood adjustment you have.

 

my new t2 is loose enough that we had to put the other bolt in, snug it up, line up the troublemaker, and then put the bolt in.

 

Mine is so bad I can't even find the other hole . Seriously. I fiddled with it but I can't find the other hole.

 

aww man..could I ever go nuts on that statement....hahhaha!....

 

Sorry to revive a dead thread BUT I am doing other work on the car now trying to solve other issues and I have been opening and closing the hood quite a bit and the repair job with rivnuts is failing on 1 bolt so should I drill it out and get it re-riveted? Or is there another solution?

The reason being is that the plates in the hood have completely falling inside and are floating around inside the hood with no hope of ever removing them.

 

I was a little better off (one stuck bolt) but what I did was get a fresh clean bolt threaded into the one captive nut, then position it so the broken bolt is in the center of the opening before tightening it down. Then I drilled a hole straight down the center of the broken bolt, and used a left-hand extractor bit to slowly remove the broken part. It might be the only time an extractor has ever worked for me. I used anti-seize on all the new hardware of course.

Can you send a picture of your old repair? And when you say "falling inside" do you mean that you can't reach the plates anymore? Even when I had no bolts in, I didn't think there was a way for the plates to fall into the hood.

 

It appears you are helping me on multiple threads lol.

It was done at least 4 years ago BUT the captive plate at least on one side is completely gone, it is floating around inside the hood and I can hear it sliding around when opening the hood.

I bought a T2 hood and on one side both bolts were snapped off and possibly one on the other side. Joe at classicauto tried to drill out the two broken on the one side and the plate ended up falling into the hood. The other side turned out ok. He suggested the only solution would be to rivnut the one side but now the one rivnut is spinning when tightening it down as there isn't much meat on the hood for it to grab onto as it is just sheet metal.

I'll take a photo tomorrow when I'm testing the other issues. It is supposed to be warmer so that's a positive.

I kind of have regrets selling the stock aluminum hood but hindsight really is 20/20.

 

That's interesting, I didn't actually know the plates could fall in that way.

This brings up the possibility that the plate could be replaced. If the old one can be removed from the hood you can make a new one. It's just a flat steel plate with some M6x1.0 threads. Then you can drop the new one in and wobble the hood around until it finds it's way home. Probably easier said than done though.

I get it, so the rivnuts are installed into the aluminum frame piece the captive plate normally lives in. Yeah, I would probably drill out the rivnut until I saw the aluminum start to peek through, then grab the remaining rivnut with pliers and try to carefully separate it. Drilling all the way through would probably damage the aluminum.

 

The something is to use zinc chromate washers with the stock steel bolts! There are other parts that require these washers also!
The lighter weight of the aluminum hood also dictates a different hood latch assembly to be installed.
I am installing a new aluminum radiator and needed to find these zinc chromate plated washers. Very easy to find.
I had a sill plate dissolve on me with my 1972 Javelin, now I know why!