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Lightweight hood.

S

Stumpalump

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Franktown Co.
Have you seen any sources for a lightweight hood? How much weight do they save and what do you think? I think I'll stick with the metal fenders but would consider swaping hoods to a light race weight one.
 
I was just reading on GoJeep the other day. He said that he had a fiberglass cowl induction hood that he swapped out to a steel cowl induction hood and iirc he said that they weighed just about the same. I'm not sure if that was just his glass hood or what but I can't imagine that they would be able to shave a ton of material. Just something to think about.

Chris
 
The stock hoods easily weigh 3x what they have to. Generally I find that the off-road crowd has a poor understanding of weight, and to say the stock hood is 'light' is a good example of that.

However, the aftermarket does not offer anything that I know of. The good news is making a fiberglass mold and a new hood out of the exisiting one is actually very easy. And fairly cheap. It's an option if you like making your own stuff...
 
knowing that my JCR sliders have 100lbs in them alone, weight savings is not one of my goals... however i have contemplated making a fiber or glass hood for my ride, the ability to get it out of the way while working on the jeep is my main goal... some bomb molded in scoops/vents would also be very nice...
 
xcm said:
the ability to get it out of the way while working on the jeep is my main goal...
Click to expand...
This doesn't answer your question, BUT I had one of these hoodlift kits installed on my XJ... it's really handy
when you need to work on the Jeep. I put together a group-buy on JF... a dozen guys got in, and everyone's
still pretty happy with it.

http://www.redlinetuning.com/QL-JEEP-CHER-8601.html



.
 
There are fiberglass hoods available for the xj....

the jeepspeed people use them. And I agree, the hood is expensive.
 
Hannemann makes a glass hood for around $125, needs hood pins to be used as there is no place for the hinges or latch, AJAX auto makes on that uses the stock hinges but not sure on the latches, would probably also need hood pins to be secured(autofab makes hood pin kits), they are much lighter than the stock steel hoods.
 
DirtyMJ said:
The stock hoods easily weigh 3x what they have to. Generally I find that the off-road crowd has a poor understanding of weight, and to say the stock hood is 'light' is a good example of that.
Click to expand...

Very true. Coming from high performance cars into off-roading is a totally different ball game. The XJ hood is extremely heavy for how small it is and how simply it's put together. If Jeep had put struts on it in the first place instead of a prop rod on just one side, they could have minimized the underhood bracing by half.

I'm willing to bet that if you installed hood pins next to each spring in the front corners of the hood, plus hood struts, you could take out a lot of the bracing underneath and make the hood much lighter.
 
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