Intriguing. I like the dive planes, I do believe the splitter should be as wide as the canards though.Installed Quick Latches with the GT500 strikers. Still got some reinforcements to do but I love these
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These are completely functional latches intended to eliminate the hood flap when going over 130mph. I bought ep-hp006-bl latches in June planning to use them some way since the hood flapping really bothered me. My car is a 17, but after my crash the core support replacement part was the newer 19/20 version and common with the GT500, so you can see the round openings that house the strikers. When the core support came in I was surprised to see the mounting points for the GT500 strikers, and since it looked like a challenge to mount the QL strikers I thought it would be simplest to use the factory ones and a couple weeks ago I was ordering some trim pieces to replace when they apply paint protection film and I went out on a limb and ordered strikers even though they seem like a rip off at 400.00 each.
I actually thought the blue QL's were not a close enough color match to my car and was planning to order black ones, so it was no big deal if I needed to get a different sized latch to match up with the new strikers. When the strikers came in last week I was very pleasantly surprised that they were the exact same ball size as my QL latches. They are also very nice stainless with a movable registration ability that works very well too. Once I got to looking at the stack-up I could tell the pieces were going to line up pretty closely. Anyway, I set the strikers in their spots and placed a dot of latex paint on the strikers and positioned them towards the bottom/front center of their range and closed the hood until they contacted the bottom of the hood. This marked the center of the latch holes and I used a 1 5/8" hole saw from the bottom and drilled out the hood. I cleaned out about 1/2 inch of the foam sound/vibration deadener material and used a syringe to get some JB Weld between the panels. I let this harden overnight and then installed the latches and test dropped the hood from 10" and it grabbed the strikers perfectly. Usually things like this don't go this well for me ;-) One thing here is I should have measured the dots before drilling since the drivers side is about 3/16 inch further back and I would have averaged the two marks to be more perfect, but they look perfect and it's not obvious until you measure them.
You can see I used SS bolts/nuts/lock washers to bolt in the strikers. Under them I tore a Mr. Clean magic eraser sponge in half and stuffed 1/2 in the center hole of each opening, then put a dab of JB Weld on each bolt/washer and wrapped a wire around the threads and fed the bolt/washer through the center hole and stood them up on the sponge to hold the 3 in place until I could set the striker on the bolts and place the lock washers and threaded the nuts you see on the top. I have a little 3/8 impact that was able to get the nuts tight without having to hold the bolt on the bottom, and that's how the strikers were mounted in the factory holes.
The GT500 has a different version of the core support that has some other way to secure the strikers, but I could only find that as the whole assembly which I would have bought (along with the GT500 hood) if the parts were available in June when I was repairing the car.
I am going to make some plates for the underside of the hood to distribute the load from the latches better, so far I don't think the hood will get tweaked from the stress, it seems good, but I want to be as cautious about that as possible. I'll keep the factory latch in place too, it works normally.
Overall, they seem to function much better than I hoped. Drop the hood from 10" and the grab the strikers and the hood is perfectly aligned and solid.