Custom Hood Lift
The fiberglass hood that came with the Exocet kit is pretty unwieldly and is tough for one person to install or remove. We often want to access the engine for maintenance or to show off but having to unbolt and remove the the hood is a real pain and gets old very fast. If only there was a way to make it so the hood can be lifted like a regular hood…
There have been several Exocet projects where people got creative with their hood solution. Some projects have the hood hinge from the front which is inconvenient if you want to actually work on the engine. Other projects involve cutting the fiberglass hood. I wanted to figure out a way to lift the entire hood with minimal effort and with minimal changes to the fiberglass.
I decided to play around with the geometry of hinging in the back of the hood like a normal car and to use aluminum angle extrusions to create mount points for gas struts. I clamped together a rudimentary prototype.
The prototype was very promising and seemed like it would hinge perfectly. I built the final aluminum frame that would spread the forces from the gas struts evenly across a larger surface area on the fiberglass.
I put together simple hinge mechanism using some eye bolts I got off of Amazon and installed it on the frame.
I then took standard bar clamps which I sandwiched an aluminum plate to serve as a mounting point for the gas strut.
With all of this, we have a very slick hood lift that is super easy to use and actually can be removed any time if we wanted to with no permanent damage to anything other than a few holes in the fiberglass hood.