I decided to wait for the arrival of the hood on Thursday before heading up to MADS. I picked it up from the delivery company very early in the morning, installed it in about 1/2 hour, and hit the road for my 900 mile journey up to VIR. Overall the hood fit pretty darn well. One bolt hole for the rear hinge was screwed up (angled) and will need to be retapped. It does look fairly decent, but I was majorly disappointed in the surface finish. I stopped counting at 20 defects....many were large air pockets in the epoxy (which can be fixed) that were scribbled over with a black sharpie or other similar marker. There were about a dozen dimples all over the hood too, most concentrated in one area, most about the diameter of a half dollar. The only way to fix those would be to use 20lbs. of clearcoat or lots of primer and paint the hood which is what I was hoping to avoid by purchasing the CF hood.

I will have to say that the vents work VERY well and my IAT's (air intake temps) dropped about 7-12 degrees over the stock hood depending on how many cars were in front of me on the highway. I'm sold on vented hoods. They DO work. Well, at least the MS hoods do. Oh, it feels as though the CF hoods are lighter than stock. Tested it to about 140 or so, and I do recommend hood pins. It seems to be very stable anyway, but for safety's sake...

 

I agree on the defects, there were a bunch on mine. And the finish looks a little hazy, like not glossy at all. I'll be using pins soon too, but it does vent VERY WELL. One of my bolt holes was fucked up too....I wonder....
~Tom

 

There were a few of the dimple looking low spots on the hood. but only a few. I had to enlarge one of the holes on the hood bracket to get all 4 bolts in. Other than that it all seems to be good. the finish on my hood is very deep gloss look and clear.

 

I just got my hood today! I had it sent to my friends shop, and something told me today that I should go by and check to see if it was there yet. Well, he told me it got there about 10 minutes before I showed up, thats just freaky. Anyway, the hood looks awesome! All the lines look to be straight. I havent put in on the car yet, so I dont know how it fits, but I plan to do that tomorrow. It seems a little weak to me, the supports underneath just dont seem like they want to help the hood stay on the car, but I'll work on that some. I was very suprised to see that my hood had the hood prop support bracket in it already. The ONLY problem I see so far is one of the corners (up near the drivers side of the windshield) is chipped. I dont have a digital camera, but I took some regular pics of it today, and I'm on picture 22 now I think, so I'll take a couple pics of it next week after it's painted and post them up. One question, what is everyone doing for the studs? Just removing them off the stock hood?

 

I bought screws from the hardware store, 1/2 - 3/4" length should do it. Couldn't get one of 'em in though, will probably have to retap.
~Tom

 

I did the same as Hyperite - the bolt size I used was 5/16". Not perfect but awful damn close. Since they came from overseas, I'm sure they really take a metric thread but thats not so easy to find over here.

 

I found metric with little difficulty. 5/16" will be about right, but you'll sorta "retap" the threads w/o thinking about it, and weakening the threads (not a LOT, but....). With the hood, i wanted it to be as tight as possible. And yes, let's disregard the fact that I did a 140 run yesterday with only 3 screws and no hood-pins.
Oh on the up side, it DID jump and bounce around a bit with flexing, but it seemed VERY stable, i'm not worried about it at all.
~Tom