How to Rebuild Hood Hinges

Hood hinges are one the areas that like a lot of car restorers often don't think about or there tend to be overlooked. The problem with the hood hinges is if it's painted, the paint will chip. There's a lot of moving parts. There's gears, there's springs. And so a lot of people try to restore them.

And if you go to any car show, you're gonna see that they're chipped and rusted in places. So this is really an area where a little bit of work can really pay off. And it's had attention to detail that sets your car apart from everybody else's. The first step in rebuilding one of these is to remove the spring. The...

I've seen a lot of guys try different things to try to loosen up this spring and it's really not that hard. Just a matter of clamping it in a vice. And then you wanna get a piece of wire or in this case, a coat hanger, not like they coat hanger they make nowadays, you'll have to go to antique store to find one of these. The... It's simply a process of pulling it free and the springs are off.

Now that the spring is off, we can inspect it. We can see if we have any looseness in any of the joints. Because these are all riveted together, in time they will loosen up, it's just from the wear of being raised up and down. And we've got one here that's just a little bit loose, we'll tighten that up a little bit. And to tighten up the hood hinges the actual rivets themselves, it's just a matter of putting it on a solid surface And giving it.

There, it feels a lot tighter now. And from here we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna sandblast these parts up and get rid of all this old finish. This is obviously, what you see in a lot of cases where the car has been repainted but the hinges weren't removed. So it's got overspray from the rest of the car and we'll get that cleaned up. Important considerations when you're blasting if you have any grease or any gasket material or anything on your hinges is this blaster usually won't take that off so you usually gotta go back and scrape those things off.

As you're blasting, make sure to check the edges. The edges are one of those areas that are easily overlooked. Also make sure you move you're in open and close. So you can get in all the places where all the material is. So you can actually get to the blasted areas.

Now that we've got everything blasted our next step will be to get these hood hinges painted. We'll be using a Self Etch Primer and the Self Etch Primer contains an acid that actually helps bond the primer to the metal surface itself. And then after that I usually like to use a Engine Enamel. They dry fast. I don't need to put on a lot of coats because you don't wanna build up a lot of thickness with paint on these, otherwise it tends to chip.

Also, you don't need to some guys I know have spread... Work and building a system to spread these apart before painting them. And that's really not necessary because as the springs collapsed, it touches itself and it would just wear the paint off anyways. Plus when the hood's open the spring is almost virtually, fully contracted. So there's never a time you're gonna see in between there anyways.

And they're easy enough to take off if you ever need to repaint them again in the future. So with that let's get started. It's always a good idea to wear a respirator when working with spray paint indoors. Okay, now let's get this hung up. And once that dries, we'll get the paint on it.

Now that we have the hinges themselves sandblasted we're going to leave them like that. Normally, if you were gonna paint these or do anything else with them you would condition the metal but because we're gonna be phosphate coating these the best finish for phosphate coating is to actually have a bare sandblasted finish. We'll be using zinc phosphate on these today. Zinc will give us a nice light gray finish to it. Another option we had though is we could have gone with a manganese phosphate.

A manganese phosphate is a also known as parkerizing produces a really dark gray almost black finish. So what we need to do is we'll mix a gallon of the zinc phosphate with four gallons of distilled water. And then we'll heat that up to 180 degrees. We've got some water and some zinc in there already. We'll get the rest of this mixed up now.

And you wanna avoid splashing as much as you can. Important thing to consider is when you're heating this stuff up, you wanna have a non-ferrous pot. What that means is you need a actual pot that's not steel because that will actually phosphate coat the pot itself. So what here we have an aluminum pot and we're gonna bring this solution up to 180 degrees. We're pretty close now.

It'll probably came down some with the gallon I just added, but we're going to... Important thing to do is to condition the solution. And the way we do that is by taking a piece of coarse steel wool. If steel wool will react with the chemicals and prepare it to actually produce a phosphate coating. So just drop that in and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Okay, our zinc phosphate solution should be pretty much up to temperature now. We'll just double check that to make sure that looks good. We're ready to actually put the hinges into the tank. Important thing here is to get them completely submerged. The zinc solution will actually go in and fill the in, in all the crevices.

And it's just a matter of putting them in and making sure they're covered. We'll put the lid back on that. And usually it takes between five and 15 minutes. But from my experience usually about after 10 minutes, they're fully covered in the conversion process is done. If you go a little longer than that then the zinc just gets a little bit darker.

Okay, it's been about 10, 12 minutes. It's time to get these out of the soup and finish the phosphate plating process. First step is to basically get them out of here. Before I do that, I do like to wear goggles when I'm pulling these out and pull them out of the zinc phosphate solution and then rinse them quickly in some water. And you can turn that around, rinse the other side.

We'll get the next one. And the water will stop the plating process. We can turn that off now, the... Next we're gonna do is we're going to spray off the excess water and then both the zinc and the manganese absorb oil. And that's the trait that they're best known for.

So after we get this sprayed off something we'll put some water displacing oil on it, WD 40 in this case. Okay, it's not important to get them perfectly dry. Remember they are still metal parts and they've been sitting in water. So you wanna pretty much just hose these things down with WD 40 and get inside all the nooks and crannies. Like I said, that coating itself will absorb the oil.

And the real plus to this is now you have a finish on here that's oil friendly, unlike paint, or a lot of powder coating or plating. The a... This is finish loves to be oiled and in doing so, your hinges tend to wanna run better and smoother. And after you get this all hosed down and really covered well, just kind of set it off to the side and let it sit for a while. There now, after that, sits for a few minutes, we'll dry off the...

Little bit of the excess oil and then we're ready to put the hood springs back on. Okay, now that we've let these sit for a while, the oil will soak into the finish and then we can go along and clean up any excess oil with a dry rag and we're ready to actually put our hood springs back on our hinges. Kind of very similar to the way we got them on there. We'll mount the springs in a vice or the hinges in a vice. You want your hood hinge fully open, again, just kinda stretch it over the hood hand.

And this car, hinges for this car are for a 58 Dodge. So the original color for the hood springs is red. So seemed a little strange, but that's the Dodge thing. You made have to get my hanger in there that time And there you have it. In the matter of just a few short hours, we took a set of hinges that were rusted had overspray paint on them needed some minor repairs and we've managed to transform them from that to a fully plated with freshly painted springs and no longer the eyesore under the hood that they once were.