• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.

    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

Stormy Weather - Hardtop seal?

RickB

Yoda
Offline
Yesterday we had a short time in the afternoon that was rain free, I happened to be home from work so I took the opportunity to put the hardtop on my Midget.

I removed the folding top completely and put the hard top on, bolted it down to the sides and latched it at the front.

So, overnight we had some more rain and when I went out this morning I found water on the drivers side seat. Not on the seat back, just the seat bottom. It was very wet.
The dash was dry, all around the seat seemed dry, just the seat bottom all wet.
I dried it off and drove to work in the rain, no water was coming in the car.

I just returned from lunch where I discovered the flooring is all wet.

The rubber seals come in contact all the way around, from the top of the windshield around the tops of the door glass and around the back of the tub.

There seems to be a couple places where water might be getting in, the corners where the top of the wing windows meet the hood seal seem to be the only possibility I can find.

Is there some rookie mistake I've made? This is my first roadster and my first hardtop that fits one. It doesn't seem like rocket science, but if someone has ideas on how to seal this up so water doesn't fill up the tub it would be really helpful. Thanks!
 
Guess I would get someone with a hose to wet er down while I was inside so I could find the leak first.
 
Goood thinking!

Or I could wait for another strong downpour of the natural kind, I'm sure it won't be long.
 
Rick, go get some athlete's foot...............spray!

Get the Desenex or any other that sprays a powder which pretty much dries in place.

It is great for spraying around suspect leak areas(in your case you would want to do the inside, rather than the outside). Great also for oil leak, coolant leak tracing, etc.

Then see where the powder gets disturbed.
 
Thanks,
It really didn't take long for another big rainy period to hit so I got in & looked around.
It turns out I really should have remembered what the PO of the top told me when I got it. I had planned on redoing the seal between the aluminum channels and the fiberglass but I completely forgot. Now I have to wait for it to dry out a bit, maybe it will be dry today.
To make it through the night I put some sticky stuff in the channel, it was much dryer inside this morning.
 
Back
Top