Adjusting Hood body gap

bluesman31

bluesman31

Senior Member
How do you adjust the hood alignment? My 28 roadster is tight in the front touching the radiator, but a huge gap in the rear at the cowl
 

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There has been a thread on this before. But the typical way is to straighten your frame. I have same problem on my coupe.
 
If the Frame is straight, then you need to shim "UP" the cowl to get the alignment and then adjust or shim to the back of the car to get the door alignment. It might be a idea to get a Auto Body text book from the Library. There should be a chapter on fit and alignment.

The Old Tinbasher
 
Have you got that gap on both sides ? If yes loosen and raise the rad a little and tighten the hood rods . I think that would pull it back where it belongs

John Cochran
 
I can't see the top rear of the hood, but it looks like you can open both sides of the hood a few inches and push the hood to the rear some. This should help a lot, but there does appear to be some frame bend at the rear motor mount area, as the bottom gap looks to be more than the top gap at the rear of the hood.

The radiator pads should be no more than about 1/8" thick, and if you have more than that, removing some of the thickness will also help to tighten the rear lower gap of the hood.
 
Looking down from a Birds eye view the hood appears to be kind of rotated counter clockwise based on the gaps. It is like I want to move the front of the top hinge Right and the Rear of the top hinge Left. The top right hood rod is maxed out for length and the other is back a bit and the left side of the radiator has 2 pads under it. Something is not square. I was thinking about shifting the radiator right 1/4" some how. The frame appears to have any damage

Front pass side: Hood touching radiator
Rear Pass side: 1" hood gap against cowl
Front Drivers side: 1/4 - 3/8" gap
Rear Drivers side: Hood touching cowl
 

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I had a similar problem with my 29 roadster. My car had the gap on the drivers side. I shimmed the right side of the radiator with some fender washers. That moved the forward hinge to the left. In addition, the holes for the rear hinge are slotted so I moved it as far to the right as it would go. The result was a close fit at the rear of the hood on both sides. The front fits tight to the radiator. Apparently my frame has some twist, but the car sits level and the radiator appears perpendicular to the bumper.
 
I agree that the top of the radiator, or the complete radiator, needs to move to the right. Loosen the 2 support rods and see if you can slide the bottom of the radiator to the right any, then tighten the right rod first to see how well you can pull the top over to align the hood. You might need to add a shim under the left radiator mount. It depends on how the radiator looks at the bottom also.
 
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