Hoods for practicing IFR are like umbrellas, tough to store and hard to find when you need one. We’ve used everything from duct tape on safety glasses through a folded sectional jammed under a baseball cap to a narrow strip of cardboard along the bottom of the pilot’s windshield on a DC-3 (it works perfectly). Other than the DC-3 system, we prefer store bought, and we’ve used them all.
We examined seven commercial IFR hoods for comfort, bleed over of view outside (one peek is worth a thousand scans), ease of scanning the full panel, ease of getting it out of the way for a VFR landing and overall functionality. We found that price was not an indicator of value.