Hi all,
I regularly use a hard top on my midget in winter. Remember this is
Britain!! The reasons I do this :
1) I live in Britain - no soft top can stop the amount of rain we get in
winter.
2) The car lives outside all year round - lots of rain (see 1)
3) It's warmer than the soft top - my heater always goes strange at the start
of winter and it takes me months to find the time to fix it.
4) A soft top covered in snow is no fun - a trip to the Scottish highlands
last new year saw us in blizzards and black ice every day (in a midget!)
5) It makes summer seem even better, when you get to take off the hard top
and roll down the hood.
6) More useable luggage space - i.e. you can actually leave stuff behind the
seats without it being pilfered - very useful for a winters climbing
trip (Remember a migdets luggage capacity is virtually zero, and that
two peoples climbing gear for a winter two week trip is very non-zero).
Now the disadvantages ::
1) The day after you bolt the hard top in place the sun comes out, and you
can't roll the hood down.
2) The very obvious one - you can't roll down the hood (this is very much
like 1) above, but I need to re-emphasize how traumatic it is.
3) Rearward visibility to the sides is reduced, not too good for seeing
who's overtaking.
I have a very standard "wrap around" type hard top with plastic windows, it
bolts
on in about 10 mins single handedly. I wouldn't want to be without it in
winter.
Andy
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Andy Smith. Senior Physicist
Royal Marsden Hospital
Fulham Road, London, SW3 6JJ
Email a.smith@rmh_lon.icr.ac.uk
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