Howdy everyone. Figured I'd punish myself and entertain yall by installing a new widget. This is a hood strut kit from OBS Solutions.

The kit came pretty quickly, packaged very nicely. Heres how the kit came all bundled up, and then a pic showing what it actually includes.





They have excellent instructions on how to install these on a perfect truck. Good thing my trucks not that, otherwise this would've been a quick install.

The brackets on the hood itself are super easy and don't require any special prep. They include new hardware.



The lower brackets are where I ran into issues. On the drivers side, the bracket is supposed to just fall right into place and bolt on. A previous owner mowt've had a ground on the fender brace bracket that had broken off. I had to extract the remain bit as it stuck out the backside where the new hood bracket needed to sit flush.




Once I got that wonderful bit out, the bracket went right on without issue.

On the passenger side you do have to enlarge an existing hole and add a new one. Not too difficult and they give you a plastic bracket as a template with a pilot hole spot. I had an issue here because there was a hump blocking the plate from sitting in the correct spot. Eventually I figured out that there is (was) some sort of fiberboard spacers between the fender and the bracket. Must be for body alignment.



Unfortunately for me, over the decades one of the boards kind of got wedged down into a hole on that bracket and created this hump that was preventing me from mounting my bracket.




So i removed those fiber boards (gasp) and replaced them with washers. Then the bracket popped right into place on that side too.



I can close the hood now with ease, nonworries about bending my hood (even more) with those jank old springs.

Be careful around those brackets, too. One of them jumped out and bit me as I was removing those fiber boards.

 

I put a set on my 97, certainly gives the truck a nicer closing hood. My springs made this horrible creaking noise that did not inspire confidence, lol

 

Nice work!