My hood won't close unless I press the latch when i close it. It's not the original hood so I wonder if it's the wrong latch or what. Any ideas?



Latch hitting the catch



Wow. Camera changed the color of the hood somehow. Heres the latch. The part you press hits the lip of the hood also.

 

Any ideas?

 

It's a cowl hood, so maybe the latch just doesn't match up with the catch? And I need to install a camaro latch? I dunno... reaching for anything at this point...

 

t looks real close to my working properly stock setup. but your safety catch is slanted or mounted so that the hook part is too far toward the rear. If you can shim or adjust it so it is just in front of the latch itself and goes into that hole it would be just as it should be.

 

Only problem if I shim it, is that the part you depress will be hitting the lip of the hood then ?! It's like the whole thing is too big or something

 

Well, The only solution I can see with this hood would be bending that part of the handle down, but seeing the way it's made that might be tricky unless you did it at an angle?? Good luck with it

 

For whatever reason, the "hooks" shouldn't swing that far forward.

 

When you reinstall the latch, you have to hold it back as you bolt it on or it will tuck into the hood.I remember a similar scenario happening to me once.
The part of the latch that stops against the underside of the hood is currently in the hole between the two bolts.

 

Thanks for the info. Could you possible take a pic of yours up close that I could compare it to? I kinda understand what you're saying but not 100%...

 

I won't be home for a few hours, but I'll see what I can do.

 

Awesome thanks. I'm in no rush.

 

Hi David,

From looking at your photo, it looks like you've bent the stop on the safety catch, so that it is resting too far inward. It should rest so that the hook firmly catches the lip where it engages under normal operation. The stop gets bent if you mistakenly close the hood with the catch not aligned properly. It comes down on the primary hood latch and gets bent over into the position yours is in now. This happens all the time. The solution is to remove it from the hood, and straighten the stop back to where it should be.

You may also have bent the thin material where the safety latch attaches to the underhood. Straightening that is a simple matter of gently but firmly pulling the safety latch toward the front of the car until the latch aligns with the opening it fits into.

 

Well, here's my hood latch.I forgot when I had this issue it was with my old steel hood & this is a factory fiberglass hood.I left the latches inplace when I swapped hoods & this looks a little different than I remember, so I don't know how much help this will be.

 

The material the safety latch is made from is super thin and flimsy. Very easy to bend out of shape. I just looked at mine again and it still doesn't look too hot from the time it got tweaked like that. I need to bench it and straighten it up more. I find the safety latches on various makes and models tweaked out of shape fairly often.

That safety latch will save your butt should your primary latch ever fail. Mine did its job on a 104mph trip down the 1/4 mile when I forgot to securely latch my hood after tech inspection. OOPS!

 

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I'll try and see what I can figure out based on those suggestions and report back.

 

Well I figured out the problem. Looks like at some point the hood was really slammed down hard with it not lined up correctly and it really smashed the base of the latch into the bottom of the hood. You can see how bent out of shape the base of the hood latch is, and the indentation on the hood itself. I found a piece of scrap metal and placed it between the latch base and the hood to build it up and screwed it back on. The latch itself is a little crooked, but it actually works "correctly" now, until I order a new latch.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions!

 

Ouch! That actually looks worse than mine. Mine got tweaked a little but I don't see that type of damage to the hood or the base of the latch. The stops that are bent over on yours got bent a little on mine also. Mine actually rolled the one side but I was able to form it back into shape. The damage is barely noticeable, and it did keep the hood down at over 100mph. I get vehicles in all the time with safety latches tweaked out of shape. Like I said, it happens alot.