Roof #4: Safari sun sheet

A new lease of life is bought to the new old stock safari sun sheet from PA Blanchards in the UK 🙂

As mentioned in other posts, the replacement sun sheet is an ex-military item for use on a “hard top” vehicle so the 4 domes (that allow the roof vents in the main roof to open) had to be removed from the battered original sun sheet and let into the new one.

Some drilling, grinding and cutting ensued. Cutting such thin aluminium is easy enough but it’s plenty noisy. As the weather was clement enough for the LGL to sit on the drive for the day, I also managed to spray it with a coat of primer

Need to make the left hand sheet, look like the right hand sheet

Original sun sheet ready to have all the spot welds drilled out around the “domes”. Using a 6mm drill but, the 80 (or so) spot welds came out easily

Spot welds drilled out on one of the domes

All done. The only thing I need this part for now is measuring the locations of the holes and where to trim the reinforcing struts

The 2 right hand domes had a few big dents in but these were easily tapped out with a hammer before refitting

Taking careful measurements of the struts from the original sheet the new panel was marked up

Measurements were double checked and with the help of an angle grinder were cut out. Once the cutting was done, a few spot welds had to be drilled out.

New sun sheet with the correct gaps in the struts

To mark up where to cut the new openings, I sat the original roof on the new one and simply drew a line on the inside of each aperture.

I stitch drilled a small slot, big enough to get the jigsaw blade in

A deafening 10 minutes later and the new holes are complete

Domes ready to fitting. (each dome is in the same location as fitted in the original roof)

First of all, drill and fit one rivet. Make sure everything is “square”, fit a second to hold it securely and, using the holes drilled earlier in the dome, use these as a template

So glad I have an air riveter. Pop pop pop 🙂

Flip it over and it all looks pretty good

Once the riveting was done, an hour and half was spent with some wet and dry to rub down the rough corroded surface… and remove the 50 years of dirt accumulated whilst in storage