Hood Latch Broke

tpkirkpatrick · Post by **tpkirkpatrick** » 30 Sep 2010, 19:04

I made a big mistake. I was following the advice of an earlier post about the hood not popping/latch needing to be lowered. Well I did that, but forgot to reattach the two pronged electronic (?) piece back to the latch. The piece was connected to the pull inside the car. I shut the hood with confidence that i had fixed the problem, went back to try and pull the latch and got nothing. At this point I realized I had never reconnected the wire. Am I screwed? Is there a way back in the hood? The crappy part is my radiator started to crack and that's why I was under the hood in the first place...

Gumcrew2 · Post by **Gumcrew2** » 30 Sep 2010, 19:22

Remove the grill ( mine just has screws on the front). my arm can just BARELY reach behind the drivers headlight and pull the latch towards the passenger side. That will pop both if your lucky, otherwise it'll be just the drivers side. Then grab the cable and push it towards driver to release the passenger side.

tpkirkpatrick · Post by **tpkirkpatrick** » 30 Sep 2010, 19:28

Sorry to sound stupid, but how do you remove the grille? I don't think mine (2000) has screws on the front.

Skottynan · Post by **Skottynan** » 30 Sep 2010, 20:17

Lol. I just had a similar problem involving my 850. My driver side latch would release but not the passenger. I read on Volvoforum.com about how to get the latch to engage and the writeup was for an s70 so no help there. Worse is that there was no way I could do it from under the car. So eventually I just liftedthe driver side enough to get my arm in there without warping the hood, and just yanked the cable until it popped open. The I took the grill off as was recommended in case it happened again. Well I ended up slamming the hood down without the grill on and snap, the hood release tab sticking out the grill broke off. F me. Anyway I'm just going to go to the junkyard for that part. But as for taking your grill off from the front, good luck cuz mine has tabs that can only be taken off from the inside. You mite be able to try and remove the headlite assembly to get at the latch assembly though. Check out the other Volvo sites if you cannot get the info you need from here, although this is definately the best one. Good luck

Post by **JimBee** » 30 Sep 2010, 20:40

The prospect of this happening to my '93 850 kept me awake at night when I first got it—which I posted about here. Some kind member offered this solution:

on the 850, you can remove the corner marker lights (a spring and hook holds them in) and look up and a bit inward; you'll see the tab to push/pull to release the latch. I have not tried it and hope I never have to, but it sounds plausible if it will work on your car. Good luck.

Post by **holler1** » 01 Oct 2010, 18:17

I had this problem on my 98 V70 AWD, and eventually had to reach through between the side of the hood and fender with a hacksaw blade and saw through one of the u shaped rods that go into the latches. Once I got it open and the u-rod welded back on, I added an emergency pull by running a bare cable from the driver's side latch out the front just above the headlight. I bent it back so it is concealed and can flip it out to pull. I was told that you could reach up from below the engine to release the hood, but after many tries I could not reach it.