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I would say fiberglass would be the way to go. Wouldn't be much fun yanking all that heavy sheet metal just to look under the hood lol I have seen a guy with a late 60's ford truck he put a tilt front end on. Was pretty sweet. It was a drag truck.
if you want a DIY project just to go the junkyard and find a COE medium duty truck and pull the hinges and spring mechanism off it, then weld your panels together. The front clip isn't that heavy, but the problem will probably be that the fenders won't close flush to the doors without actually hitting the doors, if yout hink about it... right? thats how it happens when I picture it in my mind.
That makes sense. I think if you were gonna do this you wouldn't have inner fenders, or at least they wouldn't be attach to the clip. And you would probably leave the core support and radiator where they are, so you'd have to find a way to mount the headlights to the clip. But basically you'd be flipping forward the weight of the hood, half of the fenders, grille, and headlights. Considering where the pivot point is, I don't think the weight would be unmanageable... and if you used the hinges off the medium duty trucks, they are designed to handle the weight of the whole cab. I bet you could use the setup off a big rig too, those front clips are fiberglass but they still weigh a couple hundred pounds, it takes all of my weight to flip one forward. The cool thing about the coe trucks is most of them have that cool remote mounted latch, which would be trick.