I just love answer #4 <BIGEST GRIN> and answer #5 is just bizarre. Back in the day when I was a young pup in the auto body trade (early seventies) an old timer gave me some advice that has served me well thru the years. Whenever you’re trying to align a panel that opens always remove the latch or catch / striker bolt first (which ever half is easier), then you are truly aligning the hinges without any interference from the locking mechanisms. Then only after you get your best gap do you reattach your half lock which you move around to maintain the best alignment you had already achieved. In a nut shell you align the hood, deck lid or door to the opening then align the lock to the just aligned opening panel if that makes any sense.
On our coupes I’d remove the hood grilles, the latch halves off the hood and the rubber cowl gaskets so the hood can sit down in it’s opening with the latches half removed. I’d set the hood hinge bolts to barely finger tight and pull the hood all the way back in its adjustment slots with a helper and carefully lower the hood into its opening. Move the hood into alignment and carefully open the hood just enough to tighten one bolt on each hinge, after re-checking alignment tighten all the hinge bolts and then align one lock at a time to the hood. Possibly if the headlight doors, the headlights and grilles are removed you might be able to reach the hinge bolts with an open end wrench, I just can’t remember for sure. Okay, a piece of cake right, if you believe that I can sell you the Brooklyn bridge too.
PROBLEMS YOU MAY RUN INTO. If our coupes have been hit or even had body panels replaced you can’t count on everything being in the right place and then you will never get perfect body gaps. Believe me it takes very little to knock a uni-body cars nose off center an 1/8”, then without bolt on fenders & header panel you can never get good lines. You will probably open and close the hood dozens of times during alignment, locks can jam during all this for whatever reasons, you may be glad you removed the hood grilles so you can reach in to somehow free them up. There is almost no clearance between the front hood edge and the header panel so obviously all alignment work should ideally be done before the car is painted, after it’s painted chipped edges can happen in a blink. All I can think of tonight and probably not what everyone wanted to hear :?: :x. ~ John Buchtenkirch
P.S. my own coupe doesn’t have perfect hood alignment, I will fix it if I end up painting the car but for now I don’t let it bother me so I guess answer #4 is really correct :lol::lol:.