Rover SD1, Sunroof Panel Prep

I had some spare time this evening, so decided to finally unpack the replacement sunroof panel I purchased a couple of weeks ago.

My old sunroof is stuffed, rust is bubbling through the top of it, where it has previously been touched up, and when the panel is opened you get covered in chunks of rust. Its pretty bad, thankfully its not leaking. Yet.

It looked like this when I got the car, back in November

And its got worse since.

I put the call out a while back for a good rust free sunroof panel, and heard back from Gareth at SD1 Spares. He had sourced a decent one, and would I like it? Heck yes!

It arrived a couple of weeks ago and I just haven’t had the time to do anything with it. Tonight I unwrapped it from its packaging and had a good look over it.

Gareth had mentioned there were a couple of little crusty surface rust spots, and he had treated them, so it was no surprise when I spotted a couple of sections on the underside that were coated in rust converter. Nothing too serious, but left untreated it would have ended up the same as my old one. Good to catch and stop it now.

I noted a couple of other small little spots of surface rust in various places, and wanted to make sure that rust converter got into all the little gaps and creases, so with wire brush and my can of CRC Rust Converter in hand, away I went.

I wire brushed all the patches that I could see, including the areas that had already been treated, and then hosed on the converter. I made sure to rotate the panel, and spray into the holes in the rails to try to get the liquid into all the gaps.

I’m not worried at all about the paint as its Oporto red, and the wrong color, so will need a paint anyway.

This is a little spot at the back where you can see the rust converter changing some rust into a black coating

And these two spots are the sections Gareth treated for me. I made sure to go over them again, and get into all the gaps nearby.

The sunroof panel isn’t a great design, so many places for moisture to get into and get trapped, causing rust. There are some places you couldn’t get to without hacking the panel to bits. But its all I can get, so it will have to do.

Looking at this panel also shows there was no way to save my old panel once the rust got that bad. The rust that is coming through is between the outer skin, and that rail on the RH side of the above photo.

I’ll give the converter a couple of days to cure, and then I’ll hose all the gaps and seams with cavity wax. I don’t have the money to get it painted yet, and I still need to source a good condition front seal retainer, so I need to keep it in good shape in the mean time.