MG Car Club of South Australia
MGC NEWS
MGC conversations with Richard Mixture, November 2019
Are air vents needed in the roof of an
MGC?
ello again, it’s Richard here. Now
how many holes are there in a
GTs roof? I guess this question also
applies to Bs as well as ‘C’s. That nice
old Queenslander, yes that’s right it’s
Bruce, decided to paint his aging old
body, no, no not bodypainting but MGC
painting, err, do you know what I mean?
I just can’t imagine what Bruce would
look like with paint all over his body –
not a pretty …
rear) along the vinyl pattern and re-
quired replacing. Once this was re-
moved and the 8 mm foam plastic be-
hind it was gone, it was discovered that
the entire roof underneath the metal
was covered in sheets of bituminous
material, the same as applied to the
floor. This was not painted, unlike the
floor, the doors and the C pillars which
were all painted.
H
The roof was never painted under this
foam sheeting and all the little holes
allowed condensation to penetrate
through the sheeting and rust the roof.
When this was removed the roof looked
like a colander. Air conditioning done
more than 10 years ago accelerated
this rusting process.
So, Bruce told me that “In 2016 I discov-
ered rust spots in the roof (turret) of PFT
-000” (Bruce’s rego number stand for
‘Pretty Fast Truck-000’). Because I did
not pay attention to the stone chips,
which took off the factory paint, and
sealed them properly the damage
started. Spider webs appeared all over
the roof under the pink electrophoresis
primer where stone damage chipped off
the enamel. On closer inspection it be-
came necessary to strip the roof for re-
painting. The man who I trusted to do
this major job was a master craftsman
who before he retired only did paint &
panel work on Porsche’s.
Later cars were not fitted with this foam
sheeting and the underside of the roof
was painted. A different pattern vinyl
headlining was applied to a thin fibre-
glass matt (with no resin in it) and these
cars, both B-GT and C-GT, had no
known problems.
We were fortunate enough to locate a
wrecked B-GT that still had this headlin-
ing fitted, which was removed. A motor
trimmer removed the stained vinyl
headlining and replaced it with vinyl that
matches the rest of the cabin in the roof
area.
We decided the factory Low Bake
Enamel and acrylic paint on the sides of
the car (which was done 35+ years ago)
were too far gone to be recovered. So,
a full strip to bare metal and repaint in a
modern Spiers-Hecker 2 pack with clear
coat was necessary to preserve this
original car for the long-term future.
Once the paint had been stripped, we
made several discoveries.
The second discovery was made after
the complete outside of the shell was
fully stripped. Two areas of body dam-
age were discovered in the rear lower
sill area in front of the rear wheel
arches. The right-hand side was dim-
pled but not penetrated but the left side
was damaged with big holes in it. The
shell must have been caught in a Fac-
tory jig and the metal damaged to such
With the paint stripped from the roof two
4 mm holes were discovered. The fac-
tory head lining was all cracked (front to
14