Hood Hinges:
Mine have been a little slack and I assumed it was due to weak springs. The car has low miles but the springs are still 55 years old, after all. Most of it's life those springs were in the stretched position while the hood was closed. But, posing the question to the Pontiac list got only one response and that was directions to a place that rebuilds the whole hinge. Too expensive and overkill, since these hinges feel tight but the hood doesn't stay put all the time. So I took a chance on Eckler's Classic Chevy and a pair of '55 Chevy hood springs. Reasonably priced, the measurements seemed close. Just put them on today and, not only are they a perfect fit, the hood is now quite happy to stay up on it's own. Awesome!

Blinkers:
I'm a big fan of LED signal/park/tail lighting on cars. Brighter, faster and more eye-catching also means safer. Used to be you had to fabricate your own. Then big trucks got to using them and you could buy units made for trucks and adapt them. I did that for a couple of cars. Along the way, some replacement 1156 and 1157 LED bulbs came along, and generally they were pretty poor. So I stuck to fabbing up my own out of truck lights. But then SuperBrightLEDs started selling some stuff that looked promising. I gave some of them a try and they are as bright as what I've been making myself, a bit less expensive, and a whole lot easier to deal with. Just pop the old bulb out and pop the LED replacement in. Amber, red and white are available. But, there are some catches. As I had already found out, LED lighting doesn't draw enough power to make a normal signal flasher work, since they work off of heat generated by the current draw of the light bulb. So you have to get a LED-compatible flasher. They are around at the auto parts stores and SuperBrightLEDs has them too. Be sure to get the right one. But even with that, I found that on this particular car, the blinkers still didn't blink right with the minuscule load the LEDs were putting on the circuit. Probably 55 year old wiring and connections are coming into play here. So I added to load resistors to the front circuit. They just wire in parallel to the blinker wire, but none are needed for the parking light wire. The resistors get hot, so they need to stay clear of anything heat-sensitive. like wiring and grommets, etc. So now I have LED lights on the front and rear, and on the hood ornament too. I had already converted the dome and courtesy lights over to LED.