A few weekends later the time finally came to set the hood on the front end of the truck to see how it all lined up and how it fit. There was no consistency in the lines at all. I understand that a mold is made from an original hood and that in the mass production of our pickups consistency was not always the prime focus. But in looking at this hood, the original that they used to make the original mold must have been rotted out. There were dips that were more like channels and in comparison, high spots that could have been the equivalent of the Andes mountains. The passenger side had an incorrect, rolled shape to the main body line while the drivers side of the hood had an almost perfect line. This was opposite when it came to the lower edge of the hood as the passenger side almost lined up perfectly and the driver's side was out. That was just the beginning because we then noticed three things on the top end of the hood. First off, the passenger side top-edge sat about 7/8th's of an inch above the corresponding peak of the cab corner and the driver's side was 1 1/8th of an inch above it's cab corner. Secondly, the back edge of the hood where it meets the cowl was all screwed up. The cut on it was in a zigzag pattern that screamed at you once there was a straight edge to compare it to. To show this, we used a strip of painter's tape following a straight line between the cab corner/hood. Thirdly, the slope ascending each side of the cowl were completely different from one another and did not even have matching edges resulting in one that was slightly sharpened and one that was rolled. Here pics of these discoveries:
The kicker on this was when I called US Body regarding it, I was told that this was a pretty regular condition for these hoods and that we would need to block and maybe even shear parts of it to make everything line up perfectly. That statement made me wish that there was a button that you could push that would make a ejection seat of of the persons chair.
Finally after many weeks of sanding, smoothing, filling and more sanding, we though that we were coming to a close on this tedious process. Then while blowing off the surface we found about slightly-larger-than-pinhole sized holes. These were airbubbles in the mold that we could pick at and they would quickly spread into large areas of broken surfacing. Most went all the way through the surface and some were just on the surface but they were all disturbing. We even found one that reached to 3.5 inches along the front edge where the vent holes are set to be cut out. This was right beside the hood hinge on the very inner section of the driver's side vent. Once we found all of the one's that needed to be filled, we filled them with fiberglass and drilled out the full-on holes so that we could fill them with resin. All of that done, the hood has now been checked several times so that we can make sure that new one's won't appear.
This is a pinhole on the top of the hood that went all the way through.
This one was on the front bottom edge beneath a parking light.
Resin front end holes.