I've been a member of Inliners for at least ten years, and a member of the Bulletin Board for about the same length of time, and I just noticed that there's no forum for body parts or body work on the Boards, so I'm putting this here.
My '64 Nova wagon had a broken return spring in the hood latch assembly, and for the last month, finding a replacement spring has been driving me nuts. Of course, when GM built the car, the hood latch assembly wasn't designed so as to be able to replace any of the parts in the assembly. If something went wrong with your hood latch, you went to your friendly local Chevy dealer and ordered a new hood latch assembly. That worked fine until GM stopped making parts for '62-'65 Novas, which probably happened about 35 or 40 years ago. Even NOS parts like hood latches have pretty much dried up. As near as I've been able to find out, none of the places that specialize in Nova reproduction parts make hood latch assemblies or parts for them.
So my only practical option was to find a hood latch assembly at a junk yard. Of course, that produced another problem. Namely, that most junk yards don't have any cars in their yards that are half a century old. However, one of the guys in the Idaho Chariots car club (which I belong to as well as Inliners) told me that there is a junk yard in Mountain Home (about 50 miles from Boise) that specialized in cars no newer than the 1970's. So last week, Ray and I went to Mountain Home and spent a couple of hours (and probably a couple of miles as well) searching the yard for a '62-'65 Nova. Or Impala. Or pickup. What we found was that almost all of the cars from Chevrolet in that age range had the front ends missing. We found a couple of Pontiacs and Buicks that still had the hood latches, but the springs in those are different then the springs in Chevy hood latches (Thank You, General Motors!), so that didn't help any.
We finally found a '61 Chevy wagon that still had the hood latch assembly in it. Of course, the mounting plate for that was different from the Nova, but the internal parts of the hood latch and the return spring for the latch mechanism looked the same as the ones in my Nova. So the guy who owns the junk yard pulled the latch assembly for me, I paid him, and Ray and I went back to Boise.
Today I fired up my die grinder and ground off the rivets holding the hood latch shaft in place on both of the latch assemblies and pulled the broken spring and the good spring out. As I suspected, the springs were identical. So now I have to find a 3/8" shoulder bolt with a 2 1/2" shoulder to replace the riveted shaft in my hood latch assembly. If that's not available (and I think it should be), then Plan B is to have the shaft machined for a #10-32 machine screw, which should be simple for a machine shop to do. And if Plan B doesn't work out, then Plan C is to have a replacement shaft machined out of stainless steel.
In any case, the hood latch assembly should be back in the Nova some time this coming week, and after that, I can put the grill and headlights back in the car and start working on installing bucket seats in the car.
