Under Hood Restoration

If youre content with a clean looking daily driver, or if you display your car at shows but leave the hood shut, theres no need for you to tackle this After all, who sees the underside of your hood? However, if youre of all that effort youve into detailing out your engine bay, youll want to attention to this.The underside of this cars hood was super nasty, never having been touched in over 4 decades. With the hood removed, now was the time to get down and dirty, and restore the underside to its factory fresh appearance. With the top side of the hood completely masked off, we set the hood against a fence. We used a couple of wood blocks to set the hood on keeping it off the actual ground. Here were using a wire scrub brush to remove grease, grime, overspray, and various other debris that makes the underside of the hood look downright terrible. A small section had some semi-serious rust happening. Nothing to get too excited about, but left unchecked, over time this could have led to On a freshly-painted hood, that would have, well, sucked. Some light wire-brushing, followed up with a couple of coats of POR-15, and all was right once again. In case you havent heard, POR-15 is a rust that stops rust in its tracks. A must on like these. As a final cleaning we took some 0 grade steel wool over the entire Before we used a shop vac in the blowing mode, and blew off dust, steel wool debris, etc. Heres our hood, with a sheet taped up behind it. We wanted to the hood, not our fence. At this stage, we took a rag and some de-greaser and wiped everything down again. As you can see, the yellow tape is masking off the hoods vent slots. We also taped up the holes in the leading edge of the hood where the letters attach from the top side. One can of Rust-oleums Rusty Metal Primer a nice base for our top coats. It took about a hour to completely dry. By the way, were spraying in the early evening, ambient temperature approximately 75F. Perfect. Time for our top coats. The folks at Eastwood Co. supplied us with 2 cans of their Underhood Black in aerosol format. The first can sprayed out nicely, the second can, not so much. A bad spray tip was the culprit. Two 11 oz. cans turned out to be nowhere near enough either. So, we relied on our trusty favorite AeroPRO (5933) semi-gloss acrylic enamel to finish the job. Eastwoods Underhood Black (ignoring the bad spray nozzle is actually a nice and a smooth semi-satin finish. It took 3 cans of AeroPRO to finish the job though. Basically, we ended up using Eastwoods as a The hood, Final tally: One can of rust 2 cans of Eastwood Underhood Black, 3 cans of AeroPRO semi-gloss. And as youll note in the we only went light on the coats where the hood insulation is going. So, if youre on doing this kind of job by yourself with rattle cans, make sure you up lots of are very large of sheet metal! Heres our new under hood insulation kit. This stuff is great! Its an exact replacement made of flame resistant fiberglass material, and its cut to fit our cars under hood cut-outs The individual sections have to be bent slightly to secure them into the hoods individual recesses. Its an easy job, and the end result looks great. All done. To finish off, well remove that tape that was masking the hoods vents, and in between the vents using a small brush. Weve had our hood hinges restored too, so that hood is going to look fantastic when we bolt it back up!