Quote:
Originally Posted by funola
Good tip with the wet/dry vac. Is that your new free ride? What year is it and does it look like that foam pad is original? Your Jetta probably has the woven fiber pad which lasts much longer and does not disintegrate like foam. I think some of the older Mercedes must have used woven fiber.
Have you noticed the difference in interior sound levels with and without hood pad? I think it's purpose is more for heat insulation than sound. My 83 did not have a hood pad and the paint is all blistered above the turbo area but it was no overly loud.
The old Land Rovers has a double roof to keep the interior cool w/o AC. Using the same idea, if you can create a double "roof" under the hood, I think it would work well for both heat and sound insulation.
One way to do it is to glue a bunch of 1" square x 1/2" thick balsa wood spacers to the hood in a grid pattern every 10 inches using RTV, then glue heavy gauge aluminum foil to the spacers with super glue. The foil is easy to work with and you can glue one spacer at a time with the super glue which adheres fast. You can get restaurant grade aluminum foil in much wider widths than from a super market.
What do you think? Will it work?
|
same year as yours, 85. Pad (or whats left of it) looks original, there wasn't enough left to say anything about the insulative qualities-
The center part dropped on the engine as dust, and seems to have mixed with engine oil to make a particularly impossible to clean tar like gritty substance all over the place.
I remember the blistering paint on your hood, on most of my cars the pads have been missing though, so I couldn't say how quiet they might be with it. I had one 84 300D with the pad still intact, and it was a different type of material. The material certainly held up better than the foam. this was on an 84, maybe it was a regional thing? I had the square foam on an 83 also. Cant remember a huge difference in sound-
pic-
foil idea is probably worth a try, though id probably not use Balsa, just in case something like above happens. First id be concerned about the heat that would destroy the paint also catching the balsa on fire, and second, if you have an oil disaster like above where oil soaks the hood pad, it would be doubly bad with the oil soaking into the balsa blocks, like a tinderbox under the hood. If i were going to do that, id probably use aluminum.
Personally though, id just buy a new pad. You would probably get 20+ years out of a new one you can just glue in, without all the bother of making something. These things are falling apart because they are super old, a new one would solve all your issues