Back in early June, I posted a piece about looking at fitting pneumatic hood struts to my E9. In it, I talked about the original somewhat Byzantine hood raising mechanism on vintage BMWs like the 2002, E9, and E3, how mine wasn’t reinstalled when the car was repainted 38 years ago, how my recollection is that the guy who did the bodywork told me that the thing was bent, how it’s kicking around here somewhere but I can’t find it, how I pored over every pneumatic hood strut post on the E9 forum, how they all appeared to involve welding a bracket to the inner fender, and how I wasn’t willing to do that.
What kicked me into some degree of action was the fact that the E9 has been sitting in my garage for the past two months with the hood still propped up by its broomstick as it has routinely been done since the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, but now, with my bum back, I really don’t want to try lowering and raising it myself. So I thought “Let’s throw some inexpensive parts at it. Maybe it’ll work. Worst thing that happens is that I learn something.”
As I described at the end of the last piece, it’s unlikely you can mount a strut directly between the upper and lower brackets securing the original hood opening mechanism because, when you close the hood, the two brackets are right on top of each other, and the strut can’t compress itself into zero space.
You see the problem, right?
But I wondered whether it would be possible to use the existing top bracket (the one on the hood) and mount a ball-post stud an existing hole in either the fender or bracket. On the driver’s side of the car, these are the mounting hole for the power steering reservoir, and the bracket that holds the brake fluid reservoir.
Looks promising, right?
I measured the distance from there to the hood bracket, and it’s about 20 inches. There are any number of inexpensive 20-inch hood struts available on Amazon. I figured I’d buy a set just as proof of concept. If it worked, awesome, if it didn’t and I could return it, fine, and if it took one for the team, no big deal. I found a used set on Amazon for $15.48 where clearly someone else was thinking like I was.
When they arrived, I needed to figure out what the thread size was on the ball-post studs so I could put a nut on it. I went to the local hardware store and threaded one of them into the thread-sizer, and was pleased that they were, in fact, metric. Wouldn’t want to contaminate the car with SAE threads.
Nice.
I then unscrewed the bolt holding on the forward leg of the bracket for the power steering reservoir, and found that the existing nut on the back was the same M8x1.25 thread as the stud. I screwed it into place. This seemed meant to be.
Double nice.
For the top bracket on the hood, though, the post on the stud was much thicker than the hole in the bracket. I ordered a set of M6x1.0-threaded ball-post studs, and ran a tap through the existing threads on the bracket to get it to fit.
No guts, no glory.
I screwed in the top ball-post, popped the strut in place, carefully took away the broomstick (which I didn’t even need anyone’s help for because I’d measured things about right), and was momentarily elated.
Looks great, right? I am super genius, right?
Then I lowered the hood, and was crestfallen—the strut ran out of compression room long before the hood closed. It wasn’t even in the ball park.
Cue the sad trombone.
Since the bracket for the brake reservoir was further back, I tried using it, and found that a nice little bonus was that its captured nut already had the same M6x1.0 threads as the extra ball-studs I’d bought, but it wasn’t nearly far enough back to solve the problem.
This easily fit, but suffered from the same problem of the strut not having enough room to compress.
To me, either drilling or welding onto the inner fender is not only a “no,” it’s a “no” preceded by an unprintable modifier. I looked around in the engine compartment for where else I could do a bolt-on attachment of the ball-stud. My eyes came to rest on the threaded studs at the tops of the shock tower. Hell, they’re even the same M8x1.25 thread as the ball-posts. For a brief shining moment, I thought that I could simply screw on a coupler to mate the two male studs. Then the bubble burst as I realized that there was probably wasn’t even an inch of clearance between those studs and the underside of the hood.
Good idea, but sadly, no.
So it’s back to square one. In the first part of this piece in June, I included this photo from the E9 forum that shows the bottom of a pair of hood struts anchored not to the inner fenders but to the nose panel. I’d initially ruled out this approach, as the poster says this “wouldn’t work for anyone with stock battery tray as when shut the strut would interfere,” but I’m now wondering if all that’s necessary is a slightly smaller battery.
Photo by member nosmonkey on e9coupe.com
I’ll let you know what I come up with. I am motivated by the simple desire to drive the car and not hurt myself by the simple act of opening up the hood. And we all know that, on a vintage car, the odds of needing to open the hood even on the shortest of drives is very high.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.