BMW 3.0 CSE

I discussed how I was able to gain clearance for my hood and battery box in the Good Under the Hood post but now I had to turn my attention to holding it up when open.  The factory support is a large complex torsion tube that runs the entire width of the engine compartment.  Because it goes across the entire engine compartment it would hit my battery box.  Plus, it is complex, dangerous, hard to paint, etc. and Paul had already figured out the geometry of switching to modern gas struts instead. Original hood prop system has torsion springs in a tube with arms (all the black stuff) Paul's car swapped to simple, lightweight gas struts I didn't love the welded brackets on Paul's car so I made a cardboard template to locate the pivot point and used that to make a model in CAD.  Instead of requiring welding, m...

The car is running but there are a lot of electrical gremlins that I need to find and fix.  Now that I have the car home, I'll have time to work on all these.  

When I went to install the hood it wouldn't close.  One of the underhood braces interfered with the battery box.  Some surgery was required.  We bolted a brace to the hood so that the shape wouldn't be altered and then cut out a portion of the brace, leaving as much depth there as possible to maintain strength.  We took the cut out portion and flipped it upside down inside the void to reenforce the area and then filled it with some crumbled up aluminum foil.  We reinstalled the hood and closed it to make an impression in the foil.