[theastronaut]

More hood details. With the front and rear braces tweaked to fit better, I bolted the rear brace to the hinges, clamped the front in it's final location, and the new sides were spaced off the fenders and held in place with a couple of sheetmetal screws. I used tubing to make temporary braces to hold all of the pieces in place so I could begin fitting the skin to the braces and sides.




The rear corners of the rear brace had tabs that fold over the hood sides and spot weld into a recess. The old tabs weren't the same shape on both sides and were in rough shape from all of the spot welds being drilled out, then the tab pried up to separate the skin from the brace. With the sides mocked up I made tape templates of the new tab shape to match the recess size. Instead of welding across the straight edge of the brace I made a rounded patch so the tab could be bent along the crease without worrying about the weld seam cracking.






The recess didn't match left and right, so the new tape templates and tabs didn't match... I didn't catch that when I was making new hood sides using the original sides as templates. To correct that I trimmed both tabs to match and marked where the recess should end and reshaped it to fit the shortened tab.












I taped a piece of 18g underneath to use it's edge as a guide for reshaping the recess.






I relief cut the front corners of the skin to make them easier to reshape, and roughly marked the area that needed to be stretched to correct the shape.




Edges pulled out flush with the upper grill panel, copper spoon used to weld a temporary bridge to hold that shape.




Cardboard template of the upper grill panel's profile, tape template of the new hood corner.