I’ve been having back issues for decades. Most of the time it’s just normal 68-year-old-man low back pain, kept at bay by not lifting more than 25 pounds, not spending too much time bent over engine compartments, and managed with ice, stretching, and over-the-counter pain meds. But occasionally, for seemingly no reason, the Kraken erupts from the depths and shows me who’s boss.
I had such an episode the week before last. I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary, just a number of things on a 2002 both under the hood and under the car. I didn’t lift anything heavy. I didn’t twist my upper body to apply 100 ft-lbs of torque to break a stuck nut . But at the end of the session, my back hurt, and within a few hours, the pain ramped up from annoying to acute. A few rounds of physical therapy have beaten the beast back into its oceanic lair, and I’m cautiously peeking under bonnets again.
Oddly, though, it was back pain that pushed an utterly back-burnered issue to the forefront.
When I bought my 1973 3.0CSi 40 years ago, it was a heap. The car had been cracked lightly in the nose, and had been made quasi-roadworthy with the shoddiest bodywork imaginable. I’m talking pop rivets and bondo. Really, the car needed a nose, fenders, and a hood. I bought the first two, but balked at the delivered cost of the third. Fortunately the guy who installed the new panels said he could straighten the hood, and he did.
I wasn’t kidding. The booged-up riveted section is at the left corner of the orange primer. And you can see how the hood is bowed.
The car after the nose and fenders were replaced and the hood was straightened, but before it was repainted. You can see the hood now lying flat.
I don’t remember if the hood support mechanism (a torsion bar system like in a 2002) ever worked, but during the panel-replacement process, it was removed. When I had the car painted two years later, I brought the hood support to the guy who did the work. He painted it along with the rest of the car, but could not successfully install it. I don’t remember if that was because it was bent from the front-end damage, if the slots for the torsion bars were worn out as was the case with my Bavaria, or if he simply couldn’t figure out how to install it (it’s not trivial).
The hood support with its torsion bar and folding lever arms in a 3.0CS. (photo Bring a Trailer)
The good (top) and the elongated (bottom) torsion bar brackets from the Bavaria that rendered its hood support unusable until I replaced them before I sold it.
So, for probably 39 of the 40 years I’ve owned the E9, I’ve used a broomstick to prop the hood open. Now, I’ll freely admit that there’s a part of me that revels in this. Most folks will agree that the E9 is probably the prettiest car that BMW ever built, rivaled only by the 507. Any E9 (well, maybe except mine before I had it painted) is pretty. Mine with its seven coats of hand-sanded Signal Red paint is very pretty. So when I’m at a cars and coffee and people are ogling the car and someone asks to see the engine, the fact that I open up the hood and prop it up with a broomstick is my way of reassuring my iconoclastic not-a-collector self that I’m still the same 28-year-old kid that bought the ratty barely-running coupe as the only E9 he ever had a chance of affording, saved his money, bought the nose and fenders, saved his money again, had them welded on, saved his money again, STILL didn’t have enough money to get it painted, so he took out a freaking bank loan to get the car shot. I’m still not a collector. I still don’t give a rat’s ass what color-changing the car may or may not have done to the car’s value. I still don’t care what anyone thinks about the dozens of deviations from originality that the car has. I may have recently installed a lovely Alpina shift knob and a nice-looking console faceplate and vintage Blaupunkt, but my red E9 is the physical manifestation of all of my practical get-it-done do-what-you-can-afford don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff don’t-apologize-to-people-with-more-money Hack Mechanic philosophies and idiosyncrasies, and will continue to be until I die.
So yeah, I’m kind of attached to that broomstick.
Love me, love my broomstick.
Unfortunately, with this latest recurrence of back pain, lifting the hood by one corner, holding it up, and securing it with the broomstick has become problematic. That kind of asymmetric torque-and-twist is exactly what angers things up. So, after 39 years, I had interest in resurrecting the original hood support.
And… I can’t find it. I suspect that it’s in the under-closet—the storage area that’s under the kitchen extension off the back of the house, not exposed to the outdoors like the area under the deck, but not in the basement or in the garage. The door to it is in the garage, and over time it’s become less and less accessible as I prioritize the accessibility of tools and floor jacks and the ability to park a car in the back left spot and pull it in and out.
You see the problem.
The under-closet is narrow and linear with wire shelves on both sides. It was once fairly well organized, but long things like fishing rods and power-washer attachments to reach the gutters are now suspended from cross-straps, making it impossible to stand upright, and necessitating that you crouch like Marty Feldman (a.k.a. “it’s pronounced eye-gor”) doing the “Walk this way” thing. Further, the ground (I can’t really call it a “floor”) is littered with stuff that I’ve just thrown there over the years. These things, combined with my current back situation, make it so I’d need to really want something to not only go in there but go digging for it. Since, if the hood support is even there, it’s a) likely covered by other crap, and b) likely non-functional because that’s likely why it was never reinstalled in the first place four decades ago, well, fishing for it isn’t exactly my go-to move.
You REALLY see the problem.
So I looked on the E9 forum (e9coupe.com) for ideas. There are dozens of posts about both fixing the hood support as well as options if you wish to jettison it. One approach is to employ something like what’s used in the rare expensive aluminum-paneled 3.0CSL, which was (wait for it)… a simple thin metal rod with an L-bend at the end employed as a manually-deployed hood prop.
The factory CSL hood prop. (photo Bring a Trailer)
The funny thing is that, while I was poring over BaT CSL auctions to find a pic like this, I found this on a CSL that sold in 2022 for $225,000. Incredibly, there wasn’t a single comment about it from the BaT peanut gallery. Maybe they thought it was stock, lightweight, and matched the wood dashboard.
I guess I’m not such a rebel after all. (photo Bring a Trailer)
There were also a reference on the E9 forum to this telescoping hood prop available for $15 on Amazon as an adjustable and more elegant solution than a broomstick. However, all of these are to hold the hood up. None of them address getting the hood up, which is a good deal easier on a CSL with an aluminum hood than it is on a regular E9 with a steel one. One poster on the forum commented that, with a steel hood and the torsion spring on the support not working, “you need arms like Thanos to raise the bonnet.” I never found it that bad. Well, until now.
I wondered if retrofitting the kind of pressurized hood struts that are in every modern car was possible. I looked on the forum and found numerous posts and several approaches. This one shows a nicely-engineered solution involving a custom set of brackets that mount to the hood and part numbers for the struts from McMaster-Carr, and even had a link for the drawings of the brackets and an online vendor who would cut them for a good price.
photo member jefflit on e9coupe.com
I was about to pull the trigger on this approach when I noticed that the bottom end of the strut is anchored to a small plate that needs to be welded onto the inner fender. To me, that’s a hard no. Even drilling a hole in the inner fender to anchor the ball-post that snaps into the end of the strut is a non-starter due to the risk of both corrosion and the weakening of the metal from the force on the strut.
So I was excited when I saw this other approach below that anchors the bottom end of the struts in the nose panel, an area that to me isn’t as sacrosanct as the inner fenders. However, the poster noted that in his car, he deleted the stock front-left-corner-mounted battery tray and moved the battery to the trunk, and this approach “wouldn’t work for anyone with stock battery tray as when shut the strut would interfere.”
photo member nosmonkey on e9coupe.com
I spent an evening poring over every hoot strut-related post on e9coupe that I could find, and to my surprise, couldn’t find one that showed hood struts installed along with the stock battery location and without welding onto or drilling into the inner fender.
I looked closely at both of the photos above, and noticed that in both of them, the stock locations of the lower end of the hood support are missing, presumably as part of the restoration and cleanup of the engine compartment of both cars. Here are the mounting locations in my car.
The stock hood support mounting locations.
I assume that the reason you can’t simply use both of these as attachment points for struts is that, with the hood closed, they’re practically on top of each other, so there’s probably too little space for a strut to be able to compress and then expand. Out of curiosity, I looked at a photo of the engine compartment of my recently-sold ’79 Euro 635CSi. At first glace, the strut mount locations looked similar with the bottom brackets also in the front corners of the nose, but on closer examination, the upper locations are higher on the hood, allowing more room for strut compression and expansion.
Interesting.
I can’t help wondering if it’s possible to mount the ball-post anchors to existing brackets on the inner fenders, even if I need to use unequal length struts. On the left side, there’s the brake fluid and the power steering reservoir brackets, and on the right side is the no-longer-used air cleaner housing bracket that supported the original 3.0CSi air filter housing (the car now has L-Jetronic injection which uses a different air box).
Maybe here or here?
Maybe there?
I think I’ll take some measurements and order some ball-park-length struts through Amazon that are easily returnable. As far as strut pressure goes, I was surprised to read on the forum that the recommendation was to buy 15-pound struts, as that sounded way too low, but I had my son Ethan hold the hood while I positioned a postage scale under a long and a short stick, and found that with the hood fully open, the total pressure is only 20 pounds, and with it closed, it’s only about 30, so 15 pounds for two struts is apparently correct.
So, Operation Strut My E9 Hood appears to be moving out of the planning stage and into procurement. I’ll let you know how it goes.
—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.
