How To Black Out a Hood

"So you're coming up to the Christmas tree and the exhaust is going bappety bappety bappety and all those little internal bits are going whumpa whumpa whumpa."

We took that quote right from the Plymouth ad that ran in the Jan. '68 issue of Car Craft. It was the beginning of an increasingly bizarre advertising campaign that eventually manifested itself on the showroom floor with strobe-sticker kits, cartoon caricatures, and blackout hoods. Other makes were in on it too. The blackout rear valance on the Camaro screamed big-block, the Road Runner had the six-barrel hood; even Ford had a version on the Mach 1. It was cool enough back then to rope in the customers, and the flavor lingers with old guys who try to buy back some of the original cars if they can afford it and younger dudes who try to re-create the look on garden-variety musclecars for cheap.

The best bet would have been to drill the holes for the hoodscoop andmock it up, then take it back apart and paint each piece separately.This allows you to paint the underside of the scoop and the entire areaof the hood in the rear of the scoop area. Since we had mounted thescoop months earlier using rivets, we had to paint the hood and scoop asis. The fiberglass scoop would have cracked and likely broken if wetried to remove it. This made the paint job trickier than it needed tobe. If you are stuck like we were, be sure to tape off the hole in thehood and blow the chunks of fiberglass out of the scoop. If you don't,the paint gun will do it for you and get debris in the paint and youwill have to start over.

The hood we scored from the junkyard had been painted two or three timesplus the primer that we'd applied after the scoop installation. Thetrick to this or any paint job is to get a stable base before you startto build up the primer. We used a DA with a 150-grit disc and sandeduntil the surface was even and smooth. Don't worry about rock pits anddeep scratches at this point, and you don't have to sand all the way tothe metal. According to Stevenson at Gold Coast, sometimes paint doesn'tlike to stick to bare metal. After the 150-grit, we finished it with a320-grit skim. Paint that is cracked with spider webs and crow's feet,also known as lacquer check, will crack again under the primer if notsanded smooth.

Someone had taken some 80-grit to the hood in the past and caused deepscratches, plus the hood had seen some rocks, and of course we left somerough edges with the hole saw. Rather than using spot putty out of atube, Stevenson used Sikkens Kombi putty to fill the damage because itdoesn't shrink as it dries, which would leave behind blemishes and pits.

In our case, it's the latter. We rattle-canned on the flat back in Apr. '06 when we mounted the hoodscoop to clear the impending tunnel-ram installation, and it looks like we just hit the can with a nail and let fly. We live with ourselves because at the time we wanted the street-race look. But whatever the reason for wanting a black accent panel, hood, or stripe, it is important to get the right amount of sheen. Not too flat and not too glossy. The next time you go to a show, take a peek at the lineup of open hoods and you will see everything from rattle-can flat black (us) to overpolished reflective treatments that are just a little too much like a regular clearcoat paint job to look correct. After staring at the hood for a couple of miles, we decided to take it to Russ Stevenson at Gold Coast Customs and do it right. In the end, it wasn't cheap, but doing it right seldom is.