Another Locking Hood

[MrBlue]

Greetings,
We had posted several weeks ago about securing our 72'. There were some very good ideas. We all know that anyone can walk up to our trucks and open the hood. Once there, everything is fair game. We did not like the idea of adding a padlock to the existing hood latch as this can only be accessed from under the bumper. (Big hands do not fit through a 72's grill.) We do like the idea of something that is released from inside of the cab. So here is what we did. Using a 6-foot long, locking control cable from our favorite parts house in town, we drilled a hole in the firewall, ran the cable to the front of the truck following the front wiring harness. This passed through the radiator support via a hole that was already there. This then is connected to a sliding deadbolt that we constructed. As you can see, when the deadbolt is set the latch will not move at all! When you pull the cable, the latch works normally. While this may not be a locking hood latch in the sense that it can be locked/unlocked with a key, it would be the same as any newer vehicle with an inside hood latch. The idea is that any passer by will not be able to open the hood. And if they do, the alarm is going to go off anyway.
Hope this helps someone else.
Thanks
MrBlue