mk1 hood

hi all again. looking to change my roof next. mine is electric but I've been offered and mint complete manual roof (frame, inner lining, padding, and outer skin all black). and was wondering wether it will go straight on. some people have told me yes and some not. from my understanding there both exactly the same apart from one is electric and one in not, same fitting and fixtures, yes??.
get back to me all who would know .
cheers  

A manual hood will go on to any car.
However on cars fitted with electric hydraulics they will become redundant, as they will not operate a manual frame to operate via the electric set up.

Plus on manual frames they have a locking mechanism that holds the hood in the down position.
On electric the rams hold it all down.

So you would need remove the blanking plates from the 2 side plastic trims that are at either side of the rear seat up right.
 There are 2 release tabs that come through these to release the hood from locked position.

I always caution putting old on old for the reason, that if you don't know the history you could just be swapping leaky tops etc.
Putting new on is ideal so you wont potentially have to do the same job twice.

Does your current electric set work fully?

im sure one of the guys will be along to 100% confirm shortly, but too my knowledge, the fixing points in car for main section of frame etc are the same, you can bolt the complete manual frame onto your cabby, but it will have to stay as that "manual". As the manual frame does not have the correct fixing points on it for the electric rams etc to make it go up and down electrically.

But bear with, Chrotle "the roof guru" will be along in a mo :-)

He will be able to confirm

ha ha , he must have been posting while i was typing lol

Thanks all. To the first reply. Yes all is working fine. But the outer skin is original and has cracked so needs replacing. Lowest quote £200 :-(.

I see,
You have a vynil top on, I guess from the description.
Old plastic vynil hood do crack over the years.

You can get a new vynil for £115.00 delivered to you, then it's a case of you fitting it.
It's a little tricky to do but not impossible.
Generally I would only swap frames if it was damaged.

If you like the car and are keeping it for a while, it's worth redoing the top.
Things to consider are the condition of the stuff all ready on the existing tops. Condition of headliner and padding.
You could end up swapping and find the other frame hood leaks.
So you would end up replacing the outer hood anyway which will still cost money. If your not bothered about having the power hood and the other bits are in better condition then a swap is possible easily enough.
Rich was lucky in the fact the set up he had was from a reliable source so it was a good purchase.
Sometimes on places like E Bay you don't know what your getting till it arrives, so just make sure you know what your getting.
For a little over £200.00 you could put a new mohair top on yourself.

as above if the frame is complete you will have everything you need to convert to manual. the locking mech is there on the frame, but you need to remember to have the 2 knobs off the donor car as well as the metal clips that hold them to the levers. pop the blanking plates off the side trims and you're away. if you remove all the pumps, rams, wiring, and drill off the electric frame brackets too you'll be able to make a fair wedge selling it complete. most sell these in bits and so cant get them shifted. the brackets are the hard parts to source as hardly anyone thinks to remove them from the donor before scrapping it.

like chortle says though unless its cheap i wouldn't bother. any more than £50, you may as well just buy new! chances are even if donor hood was recent its been done on the cheap, so it'll still have a rotted interliner with horsehair all coming out everywhere. this is something you can easily check though half open the hood and take a look down the side, if you see splits and horsehair its going to need a new interliner.  chortle does them too so get at the same time, you can make em up yourself but its a long hard job and i never would have bothered if they were available when i did my hood

the other problem is you cant really inspect the hood & frame properly without stripping it down, on mine the frame was really rotten when i had the hood off so i had to change it, and the donor hood i bought had a rotten window frame so i had to change that from my old roof! donor headliner was trashed too so that had to come off my original frame. all in all a half day job turned into a 2 day right pain in the sacks job