• 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

Tonneau cover repair

Share this page

Upland

Upland

Member
Country flag
Offline
Just finished a major repair on my 50 year old tonneau cover (TC). The PO had glued 4 large thick vinyl patches over holes in the TC, functional but very tacky. I used a can of carpet cleaner on the underside of the cover, and vinyl cleaner on the top side. I removed the patches to find 4 quarter sized holes in the cover. I reversed the patches, vinyl side up, and with 3M adhesive bonded them to the underside of the cover. Then using leather magic (lm) vinyl prep solution readied the hole and surrounding area then I applied the lm vinyl paste to the hole and surrounding area, covered it with a grained transfer paper and heated it with the polyvance iron. 2-3 coats and it was looking pretty good, sprayed the whole cover with polyvance's texture spray and then used LM's black vinyl dye for the whole cover. Probably could have stopped there, but I gave it 2 coats of Forever Black convertible top revitalizer and some vinyl conditioner. Cleaned and oiled the zippers and we are ready to go.
 
Good work!

I really could use to do that on the cover for my MGB. It's got a couple small tears but is otherwise in really good shape.
 
The most technical part of the repair is, the amount of heat and how long to apply it. The full leather magic vinyl repair kit comes with a wand type iron with a small spade head. It does not generate as much heat as the Polyvance wand, so I used the Polyvance unit for the thick vinyl of the tonneau.
 
Back
Top