Best seal for leaking roof hatch in high top?

[custardwaggonman]

Hi all,

I have a fibreglass high top with a square push-up roof hatch. It's now leaking inside the van and it seems like the exterior rubberised seal needs replacing. Does anyone have any ideas of the best material to use for this job? Some sort of flexible transparent sealant seems the best move?
Any other tips and help for leaky hatches?

Also, the top is lined with carpet on the inside and is coming away where the damp has already got in. What's the best adhesive to glue this back on?

T25 newcomer so all tips and help gratefully appreciated!

cheers
John

[Sir Brixalot]

Looking for the same info. Water running down the steering column, think its coming from the high top skylight which seems to be smothered in hot glue? Windscreen seems watertight. Thinking of wrapping fibre glass round the skylight and wondered whether any of the members have a view on this approach

[custardwaggonman]

I fixed my roof hatch with good old silicon sealant which seemed to do the trick just fine. Not sure if it would do the trick for bigger cracks. You may want to look at some boat building sites as these fibre glass hi tops seem to be of similar construction?

Cheers

John

[tabbytiger23]

for sealing the roof i would suggest Sika Flex which is a silicone type adhesive, which everyone seems to use on the hightop roofs, you can get different colours ie black white.
i have bought some myself to go around my roof with.
last year i also fiberglassed a tear in the hightop, also when i got up there to do said tear which i could see from standing on the ground, there was 4 to 5 holes where it looked like someon had tried to fix a satalite dish or something behind the skylight so i did that too with fiberglass.

but yes have a look at Sika flex, amazon sells it its where i got mine.

[Sir Brixalot]

Thanks for the advice- my clutch master cylinder was pssing into the cab so I'm hoping that's all it was. Keeping all the advice in the memory bank though

[Rich Tea]

Hello John,
I'm just in the process of undertaking the same sort of repair you're talking about.

I had a leak from the skylight, when I took it off and removed the old sealant I found there were 87 holes through the roof around the edge of the where the hole for the skylight was. I assume there had been many attempts at fitting previous skylights. The only option was to make good and start again.

For my repair I abraded the area back with sand paper and cleaned down with MEK, I used a cheap taper reamer to clean out the holes. I then bonded two layers of 2" wide fibreglass tape to the underside of the high top using epoxy resin (the stuff they use for flat roofs, not the glue). The benefit of the epoxy resin is that it doesn't smell for evermore, unlike the polyester resin you get from the motor factors. I then filled the holes with resin from above and painted resin on the top of the high top, around the skylight hole (as there was a bit of crazing of the original gel coat). Once all that had gone off I sanded back again and filled any remaining imperfections with a skim of body filler, before rubbing back again. I then painted the area and let it dry.

For sealing the Skylight ideally you would use a polyurethane sealant. As I feel it's best to keep silicone sealants away from your van. The reason for this is that silicone contaminates surfaces preventing the adhesion of other paints and glues you may use in the future. However, it's practically impossible to clean all traces of silicone, so as I wanted to use the old skylight, and it had already been contaminated with silicone sealant, I had no choice but to use silicone again (as in theory, the adhesion of any product would now be suspect). So I pre drilled the holes in the roof, applied building silicone to the underside of the flange of the skylight, placed it in position and screwed down with stainless steel screws. I then fillet sealed the edge of the flange and dome sealed all the screw heads and tails.
It's not leaked in the past two weeks (fingers crossed for the future). I'm on to refitting the roof lining now.

I hope it helps

Rich

[custardwaggonman]

Thanks all for your suggestions and ideas. The leak wasn't too bad so a quick black of sika flex has done the trick.

Cheers
John

[Cruz]

Sikaflex

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/georgina_s ... _vent.html