Fitting the Hood - Part 4

Today's the day..... Glue Day!!

I was up early to get the heater on in the Garage - it was 4 degrees this morning. I had left the hood in the bathroom overnight as this is the warmest room of the house. After an hour or so the garage was up to a toasty 20 degrees.

I draped the hood into position and placed an electric fan heater on the transmission tunnel to warm he hood up some more:

The first task was to manoeuvre the hood into position - taking care to ensure it was lined up equally against the marks on the hood bows. This involved a bit of mucking around taping and un-taping the hood to the windscreen and getting a feel for the tension at the back of the hood when pulling it:

Eventually we were ready to start. Following the advice from Paul at GD I sprayed evostick onto the first 6 inches of each GRP moulding. You only need to spray the glue to the GRP - once you let it tack off it gets a very good hold onto the hood lining:

I left the glue for 5 minutes and pulled the hood taught and affixed it to the moulding - lining up the chalk centre-line with the middle of the gap:
A good measure of the correct tension is when the window surround trim is within 5mm of the GRP section at the centre of the car:You can then work the hood material round to each door shut and check everything is symmetrical. In my case it was, give or take a couple of mill, so I sprayed the remainder of the GRP, tensioned and bonded the rest of the hood. For ease as I was working on my own I split each of the remaining sections into 2 more manageable chunks:

The above photo was half way round the one side. The following photo is after all the back section has been glued. You will see a few creases developing on the rear quarters (partly due to the tape on the screen slipping!) - but these will pull out once the final tension is applied to the front. I had some dinner to let the glue go off a bit before tackling the front - doesn't take long as the garage was getting quite warm by now!!

I removed the tape from the front and re-tensioned the hood to get all the creases out - this was easy as the hood was quite soft by now. I taped the hood back down to the screen and marked the taped where it passed over the top edge of the hood bow - this would let me know how far to pull for the correct tension when gluing.

I then removed the tape from one half of the screen and sprayed the evostick on the front face of the hood bow - don't glue the top face as this is not the natural line of the hood:

And then simply repeat for the other side. After which I went mad with the Duck Tape just to take the pressure off the freshly bonded glue joint:

And there we have it:

I am quite pleased with the shape and lines of the hood and the absence of wrinkles! The hood ended up about 5mm off centre over the screen but I didn't think it was worth un-gluing - particulalry not just to end up with it 5mm out the other way!

It also looks quite good from the inside:

After about an hour I loosened the hood bows and let the front part of the hood hang to relieve the stress on all the glued joints. I'm away for the rest of the Easter weekend so this will give the joints plenty of time to cure before I start the process of trimming / tidying the edges. (Since doing this I've now removed the entire hood and put it on the spared bed so the glue can cure without any extreme changes in temerature).Top Tip for fitting the Hood....... do it in the middle of an August heatwave - not when there's frost outside - it'll save you a fortune on your electricity bill!