1971 Chevy C10 Pancake Hood Modification - Project Get Shorty

In order to get the hood skin to dive down up front, the top of the front inner bracing had to be removed.

Here's a bird's eye view of the cut up hood. Although it may look like there's more work in this hood than a human facelift, it's really quite simple--theoretically speaking.

Next, we set the bottom of the hood in place and tacked in its proper position (i.e., spacing, placement, and gaps). One thing you want to be sure and avoid is having your hood slide here or there and throwing everything out of whack. The top of the hood was then dropped in place.

A few months back I did a story on various styles of clamps. It's situations like this where a variety of clamps are a must in any shop. Using my Eastwood Intergrip clamps I was able to secure the two pieces of the hood together for a perfect butt weld.

I then tacked the hood from the rear to nearly 6 inches from the beginning of the curve of the corners.

Here's why I stopped short of tack welding the entire hood back together. Because we removed 1 1/4 inches from the hood, the contour of the front of the hood won't line up, much like A-pillars won't when chopping a top. In order to set the right contour, we're going to lay the front of the hood back 1 inch and pinch the corners.

To get the hood to lie back, the middle of the hood was split down the middle. We also split the bottom of the hood at the corners (Note arrows). At this point the hood was laid back and tacked in place.

To pinch the corners of the hood, they must be pie-cut with a pair of tin snips.

The pie-cut corners were then pushed into position. When doing this, the bottom corners created a slight nipple at the cut marks. To smooth things out heat was applied, and the nipples were hammered flat. The next step is to weld the corners up.

Once everything is welded up, the only thing left to do is grind things down and add some filler over the cut marks. Here is an up-close view of how the corners turned out after I laid down some lead.

Here are a few shots of the aftermath. If you'll notice you can see hints of the original '71 hood, but at the same time you could swear you're catching a glimpse of a '67-69 hood.

It's like some sort of Jedi mind trick!