Hello All,

I wanted to pick up from where I left off on this project. I intend to finish this car this summer along with the 1966 galaxie 500 XL.

The reason my interest waned in the LTD is I found a good deal of rot under the vinyl roof and padding.

Here are the pictures of what I found:

Ford used this fibrous padding under the top but only on the sides to hide the steel roof body lines under vinyl.

The padding stops at the seam on the sides of the main top section.

It's the padding that seems to have held the moisture and do the damage.

This is the disturbing portion of the show. The vinyl top was stapled and nailed, yuppers, nailed into the steel roof. There are loads of holes to weld and grind smooth shut.

I am currently working on stripping all the paint and glue from the roof as well as remove the front windscreen to fill those holes created by loads of staples and nails.

The problem stemmed from the staples, nails and emblems that punctured the vinyl and let the water seep through and into the padding where it stayed to break down the paint and oxidize the steel. The vinyl top was in otherwise really good condition and original. The older people who bought and owned this car originally did try to take care of the outside and inside at any rate. The mechanicals, not so much.

The new top is going back on without the padding because we are not going to have a repeat of this. It will have the roof line in the vinyl but I'm ok with that as it's better than dealing with this.

When I put the new vinyl top back on, it's getting just glued back into place I have no idea why on earth Ford felt the need to the staple and nail through the steel roof. Now the side LTD emblems are problematic in that the studs for the decoration have to pass through the vinyl and steel roof. That's the reason why the puffy padding will not be going back on as there is no real way to guarantee keeping moisture out through those punctures.

I will say one thing that Ford glue is something to behold. I've tried acetone baths, scraping and in the end just have to resort to buying sanding packs for the sanders and just sand it all off. It's incredibly tedious. This roof is just a massive headache.

Cheers