Rover SD1, Removing Some Ugly

I finally got the balls today to fix something that has bugged me about the car since I got it. The saggy bonnet liner.

I knew it was hanging down in the front corners when I got the car, sagging onto the battery and airbox, but recently more and more of it has started to sag and hang down at the top onto the various components in the engine bay.

It was an embarrassing ugly-ness at the last show when I had the bonnet open, but the problem was that I had no real idea what was under the liner.

I could see under the corners that were sagging, that there was some sort of adhesive that had been applied, and it was super ugly with bits stuck to it here and there.

How far did that adhesive extend? Did it cover the whole bonnet? If I take the liner off will it look worse? Is this a good idea? All questions I had to find answers to, today.

So I started off by popping all the clips. There are three metal clips on each side, offset from the center and two small clips at the top. The metal spring clips are a bit weird. Kinda like pre-historic versions of the plastic Xmas tree push clips used today. I guess they work though, they were the only thing holding the liner on.

To get them out I just used a flat blade screwdriver to lever them out, gently. My clips were stuck to the liner, but were obvious when free from the bonnet.

Off came the liner

It’s a weird mixture of materials. A felt-y material on the engine side, a pressed cardboard-y material on the bonnet side, and a whole bunch of chopped strand fabric in between.

This is what was left on the bonnet with it removed

Not perfect, but really not as bad as I expected. Lots of glue on the sides, but nothing down the middle.

The reason for the sagging was obvious, the fabric and cardboard was still stuck to the bonnet.

Unfortunately there is some surface rust where the clips were, so I’ll need to deal to that

I had a quick go with a scraper to remove the worst of the chunks, it’s come up OK for now

But I want to remove the rest of the adhesive. It reminds me a lot of the thick, smelly yellow glue that mum used to fix my school shoes with back when I was a kid. Its kinda rubbery in texture, but I know brake clean will not touch it.

At the end of the day, I’ll probably keep an eye out for a black, self adhesive sound deadening material (like Dynamat but cheaper and without branding all over it), which I will cut into three sections and place on the flats of the bonnet (leaving the two long supports exposed).

In the meantime though, I feel it’s an improvement.