Evidently I joined the ranks of "the damn hood won't open"... Then the battery died.:smsoap: Then we have record cold temps and I can't move the Jeep from the cold garage to the heated garage (hard to charge the battery when the hood won't open, dead battery, won't start.. you get the idea).
So I had a couple of weeks of driving the wife's Explorer, affectionately known as the dumpster, to think about how I was going to open that hood, without taking the headlights out. Unless you have a trained orangutan you're not getting your arm up from underneath to pop the latch free.
So I made this out of about two and a half feet of 1" by 1/4" steel:
I drilled a 1/4" hole in the end and cut it into a slot. The lower hole didn't work, ignore it.
It need a bit of a tweek:
Then I slid under the Jeep with a flashlight, found the rod that goes between the latches and slipped the tool over it. While the wife pushed down on the hood I twisted the tool a bit to make it grab and slid the rod to the side and POP, the hood came open!
The moral is; don't forget to snap the cable into this bracket when you put the hood back on:
Oh, and that tool now lives under the back seat, just in case.