In today’s video, we firstly change the bonnet from my spare to the original, albeit wrapped in gloss black (badly, I know lol). Once we’ve done that, we then install a gas strut to replace the factory installed bonnet stay. This is a kit from AliExpress that I’ve had lying around for about a year now, just never got round to installing it. It comes with full instructions which aren’t the clearest, but a little bit of engineering experience goes a long way with poor instructions. We decided that instead of using the headlight mount that was in the instructions, we found a threaded stud on the off-side suspension tower, so we used that for the base of the strut. The top of the strut was installed by removing the sound deadening material (which is to be replaced by better material in an upcoming video) and use one of the holes in which the plastic retaining clip would normally hold the OEM sound deadening material onto the bonnet. All that was needed in addition to the kit contents was an extra nut to hold the upper strut mount onto the inner bonnet skin. Other than that, it was a very comprehensive kit; it even came with two struts in case you decided to remove the OEM bonnet stay bar and install a second strut on the near side too. I decided against that because the bonnet is very light and the strut isn’t too string, so I don’t anticipate any warping of the bonnet by the strut only being on one side.

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This isn’t the link that I used to buy these struts, that link is long gone. From what I can tell, this link is basically the same item. I can’t be held responsible if it’s incorrect though!
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10050...