Torque spec for hood bolts???

[Barry Wolk]

I did RTFM, but I found no info on the strippable captured hood nuts. They are 5/16-fine.

I'm torqued up to 15 pounds, but I want to go no further without verification.

[Milsteads Garage]

Torque spec on a grade 5 (I’m assuming you are using original hood bolts) is 18 ft lbs. I go with grade 5 specs that they used to install body and trim parts simply because I’ve broken enough of them off. Not sure if you remember when I joined the forum around 10 years ago but I just fixed up a 58 Cadillac coupe and that car was miserable with all the fine pitch bolts they assembled that car with. Personally if I was in your shoes Barry, I would replace your hood bolts with grade 8 bolts. Yeah, they don’t look original and you might run into somebody with something to say negative about it but that’s a whole lot of hood to shoulder with a 5/16 bolt.

[Barry Wolk]

I did use grade 8, but the cages nuts likely aren’t. I could bump it to 18#.

[Milsteads Garage]

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Not sure if you can read my handwriting but here are some notes I took when our nut and bolt supplier gave a class on fasteners. A grade 8, 5/16-24 bolt will take up to 29 ft lbs. Working off of memory, the cage nuts you had made are of great quality so I would suspect it would take the torque also.