I've also been working on the SS hood I got from another member for cheap because the bracing had been cut out for a high rise intake.
Following the advice in
this thread by
tmcmillan5 I have started the process of repairing the damaged hood bracing (or frame as I will refer to it in the rest of this post)
Unlike Tony I am fortunate enough to have a malibu hood to practice on before separating the frame and skin of my SS hood.
First order of business, pop all the spot welds holding the flat skin to its frame.
Here the hood is upside-down on a cart and the spot welds along the front of the hood have been drilled with a blaire spotweld cutter.
IMAG0093 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
Here's a close-up of the drilled out spotwelds on the front.
IMAG0092 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
Here's an action shot of my dad taking a turn with the spotweld cutter on the driver's side of the hood. You might be able to sneak a peek of my niece holding the work light.
IMAG0094 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
After we got all the spotwelds drilled out, we put a little heat in the frame using a torch (heat gun MIA or busted) in the area where the skin and frame are glued together. While moving the torch to evenly heat the frame I used light pressure with a body spoon to separate the frame from skin. The adhesive seemed to all pop loose all at once.
Here's the frame we removed from the malibu hood.
IMAG0100 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
IMAG0101 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
Now that we felt comfortable separating the skin and frame on the malibu hood we carried out the same procedure on the SS hood.
Here's the frame we extracted from the SS hood. If you look close you can see a little bit of it missing.
IMAG0102 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
Here's a shot of the SS skin after removing the frame.
IMAG0104 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
We noticed a major different in the frame of the malibu hood and the SS hood, and that was these extra brackets that are spot welded to the frame to support installation of the SS hood louvers.
IMAG0103 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
Each is held on with 4 spot welds. I only had to drill 5 of them, the rest broke. Here's a shot of my holding one of the brackets in place on the good frame we pulled from the malibu hood.
IMAG0108 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
And here's an initial test fit of the malibu frame in the SS skin. Looks pretty darn good to me. You can see the malibu skin leaning off to the left side of the pic.
IMAG0105 by
unclejoeyv, on Flickr
At this point we just need to clean the SS skin and Malibu frame down to clean bare metal then hit them with a coat of black SPI epoxy, weld them together, then touch up with epoxy after we clean up the welds.