hood center molding

I purchased a repro SS hood center hinge from Irv Blonder many years ago.  I imagine that stock was depleted many years ago but you could check with Dave Murray just in case. It didn’t work directly, I had to do a lot of grinding to make it work, the flange legs were too long and I burned out my Dremel cutting them back. I have the original which is surface rusted and would need to be rechromed. Alhough a better design it didn’t work too great either despite having no apparent internal damage. John Cislak has parted out several cars and he may has something better, but I could send mine if it is better than what you have.

My hood was already unscrewed from the center hinge rods when I bought the car, but I assembled it back on by myself on the car, rather than try to coordinate and manhandle it with multiple people installing the whole assembly onto the freshly repainted car. Think of four ushers trying to drop a casket into a hole with 1/8″ clearance without hitting the sides. I attached the center hinge with the attach rods, archer and tail of the arrow first after carefully measuring and adjusting the distances from the body to the radiator shell. I then placed each hood top panel with sheets between the body radiator shell and hood panels and then screwed the top panels to the attach rods. After checking the fit and movement of the top panels I propped the top panels up a bit with so e foam and placed the side panels into the valley of the fenders with thick blankets to protect the paint and raise them enough that the piano hinge rods would clear the radiator shell. It had taken serious bashing and penetrating oil to get those rods out in the first place and I didn’t want to do that with the freshly painted car, so instead of the original piano hinge rods I bought SS all-thread rods to replace them. I cut a taper in one end and cut a screwdriver slot into the other (front end). I then jammed two nuts on the front end and used a drill driver with a socket to turn the rods. Tricky to get started but once the first pair of loops were engaged the threaded rods turned themselves in slowly and methodically. When it was almost all the way in there wasn’t enough clearance for the socket so the last 6 inches or so I used a slotted screwdriver bit to finish driving it in flush. Theoretically it shouldn’t be a heroic effort to remove the side panels if required in the future. It is a lot of screws on the center hinge!

Kevin, you are correct. I have included pictures of my 1931 Model 42 hood while it was in paint. My 1934 840A has the same hood configuration.