Yesterday I set out to fix the hook on my hood latch and after the deed was done, at the time of reinstallation on the car body, I forgot to attack the wire to release the hood latch. That is, if I I'll on it, nothing will happen. I recently heard of someone whose latch broke, and he just took the lower front cover and pulled the wire himself, but my wire is not even connected to the latch. What can I do? Is there anything I can do at all? I just had all fluids cracked so I won't need to open it unless in an emergency, but I know I will need to open it eventually. Any help would be much appreciated.

you should be able to do it from under the car on the inside

Yep, happened to me a week or two ago... you're left with two options, first you need to access through the bottom, this means you jack up front of your car and safely put it on jack stands, remove the bottom bumper cover and reach up to the hood latch. Now:

1. option - try to reach the mechanism that releases the hood (that the cable should be connected to). You should be able to reach that with a hook-like tool through a small hole on the bottom of the latch... It took me about 15-20 minutes before I managed to do that, so be patient.

2. option - undo the three bolts that hold the latch in place and open the hood with the latch still holding the hood. Now simply take apart the latch from the hood by releasing the mechanism by hand. NOTE: If you did not remove that bolts for a while, I would go with the option one, as they tend to get rusty and break off, leaving you with another problem....

Some useful information here: http://www.6gc.net/forums/index.php?showto...=hood&st=20

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Hi, thanks. I thought of #2, but this particular hatch has a cover on one of the screws that prevents it from being unscrewed from the bottom, I could unscrewed the other two, but it would be impossible to unscrew the third.

I think I will be doing #1 when I get home, I have an extra latch, for a RHD car to more or less see what my fingers need to do. The question I have is: How much force did you need to apply to release the hood. I am thinking that a lot of force would be needed.

Thanks for the input, I hope I won't have much trouble.

not really... the spring for this mechanism is fairly small, so the force needed is quite minimal. But locating the mechanism (perhaps lever is a better term) through that hole is a bit tricky, as you don't know what are you pulling/pushing

another day another problem..
there was just a forum for this specific problem


SEARCH!!!

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I did and found it, but the problem was slightly different. Nevertheless, I did fix the problem by unscrewing the hatch and then opening the hood just like Nihil's #1 suggestion. Thanks everyone for their input.