356 C Hood Latch

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Harlan Halsey
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Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 2:05 pm
Location: No Cal SF Peninsula

356 C Hood Latch

#1 Post by Harlan Halsey »

A few days ago, the hood of my 1963 SC refused to latch tightly. I assumed that the latch needed attention and that this was an opportunity to install a second safety hood latch wire. Wrong on both counts. :cry: Looking at the latch, what is the small hole for? oil?
IMG_0839 63 C Hood Latch.jpg
Obviously, the hole is for a Starrett punch, but why?
IMG_0840 Pin.jpg
It turns out that as you pull the latch lever, the latch goes through open. closed, open. This means that if the wire breaks the latch will fail in the open position. The hood will be held by the safety catch. And it also means that you won't have the difficult job of opening a latched hood as you can with the 356 A cars. And it also means that the hood wire is in constant tension, holding the latch lever in the middle, closed, position. In my case the knob had unscrewed enough so that the pull wire didn't hold the lever against the spring in the closed position. Had I known how the latch worked I could have simply screwed the knob on far enough to hold the latch closed. But I wanted to add he extra pull wire anyway, so I disassembled the whole thing.

It turns out that the latch has a cup into which the end of the latch wire conduit tube goes. Further there is a bulkhead right about where the tube goes into the cup. The only exposed part of the pull wire is about an inch between the end of the cup and the lever clamp. This means that a second pull wire would span only an inch or two before passing through the bulkhead. Not enough space for the new wire to bend as the main wire pulls the lever. It would have to slide back and forth through the bulkhead each time the lever was actuated. I straightened the old wire and pull tested it. It seemed to me that it was more likely that the new wire would foul than that the original wire would break in that short, exposed section. And if the wire failed the latch would be in the open position anyway. So no extra safety pull wire on my SC.

But what about the small hole in the latch? Well, it turns out that a Starrett punch inserted through that hole holds the latch lever against the spring in just the right position to tighten the clamp screw on the pull wire. :D
And greasing the pull wire and cleaning and lubing the latch after so many decades was a good thing. The latch now works beautifully. :D

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DonCichocki
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Location: Lafayette, NJ

Re: 356 C Hood Latch

#2 Post by DonCichocki »

Surprised the workshop manual doesn't mention this, thanks Harlan.

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Doug McDonnell
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Location: Augusta,Michigan

Re: 356 C Hood Latch

#3 Post by Doug McDonnell »

Nice concise discussion Harlan. Here is an old thread about the C latch: viewtopic.php?t=30517&hilit=hood I see no mention of the change in my 356 workshop manual but apparently it made it into the early 911/912 manual. The C/SC has a few features that were introduced on the early 911/912. An upper latch from an early 911/912 works perfectly on a C/SC even though the finger bar is longer. I would assume that there was a TSB back in the day about the new latch. If someone has a set of the TSB's they could check.
1965 356C 2000 BMW 740i Sport 1967 Honda CL77 There is never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over.

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