>First, I decided to sand off and repaint the convertible top frame as
>long as I was replacing the top. Removing the frame appeared to be
>simply a matter of drawing three bolts on each side of the car where
>the frame mounts just behind the seats. Unfortunately, drawing the
>first bolt brought to my ear the unhappy sound of a nut rattling down
>inside the car body. Oops. It appears that the bolts attaching the
>top frame to the car are somehow nutted inside the car body. So right
>now the frame is loosely but still workably attached to the car. What
>do I do now?
I'm not sure how these "nuts" were originally attached at the factory,
maybe some kind of soldering, but 4 out of the 6 on my car have disappeared
into the body panels over time ! Anyway, the solution is simple. You can
buy replacement "nuts" which are actually collapsible threaded inserts. They
are kind of like "ribbed" rivets and the idea is that you pop one of them into
the hole, insert a special temporary bolt which, when tightened causes the
rivet to catch on the back of the panel and crunch up locking it in place.
Remove the temporary bolt, which incidentally has an allen key head, and it
works as good as new. Well not quite, the ones I used were a bit bigger than
the originals which meant I had to drill out the panel a little.
If you have a copy of any J.C Witney catalog they sell a kit of these things
for about $25, or go to any good hardware store with the bolt in hand !
Andy McLean
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