Watertight at Last!

One of the problems that our car has suffered with is a damaged hood. The hood itself was fine - in fact, arguably the best hood out of those one all our cars - but the plastic window had become detached from the surround. I suspect that the previous owner had been dropping the roof without unzipping the window...

We wanted a new hood. An bit of canny eBay work got us an entire roof including frame for £28. We had to pick it up ourselves, but we turned this into a decent weekend away, so all good. The replacement roof was described as 'not A1, but serviceable'. It has a pretty major rip where the rain rail hold it in, but most importantly the zip out window section was perfect. See where we're going here? :-)

You can't just zip in the new window - you have to remove the roof first. It's not that tricky to remove as we discovered. To undo: 14 x 10mm nuts around the rain rail (bear in mind we'd already stripped and binned the carpet), then strip back the seat belt tower plastic cover and undo 6 x 12mm nuts (3 per side). The roof will be out fairly easily. The Haynes manual actually totally misses out the rain rail part! Fail.

Here we are with the roof removed:

Having removed the original roof carefully, I zipped out the window section of the replacement roof and then realised that the zips are incompatible. We were pretty annoyed for a while until we decided to unpick the zip from the original window and resew it onto the replacement.

I left the girly sewing stuff to Katy. ;-)

Unpicking:

Ready to sew:

Pinned in place:

Full on sewing machine action:

This took some time, but seems to be pretty successful, I'm pleased to report.

I cleaned up the rails quickly. Ideally, they'd be repainted, but we needed to crack on. A task for another day.

After that we had to wait until a few major rain showers had passed before rolling the car out of the garage to give us space to pop the roof back on. It's not the easiest task in the world to re-seat the roof into the rain rail and then attach the metal cover rail in place. Katy took this task in hand with remarkable skill. I'd never have done it.

Katy's top tips: drop the roof into place, attach a couple of the 12mm bolts on each side, then raise the roof. Leave the window unzipped so you can reach inside and out as you need to. You will need to have someone (my job!) hold the roof still at various stages of fold so that you get the correct tension to allow you to feed it in.

Here she is refixing the metal rail on her side of the car:

And here you are, a totally fixed and awesome roof: