Caught in the Rain Stories!

[CRZN427]

A couple years ago the Wife and I went to San Pedro, about 250 miles from our home in Morro Bay. We stayed at a motel where I put my light duty cover over the car for the night.

We woke up to find that it had rained quite a bit over night and the car, an LAExotics, had water in the foot wells. I determined that the rain had soaked through the light cover and accumulated in the car from the area between the rear deck and the rear fenders where the body slopes forward.

I believe that the snaps on the original Cobras were placed in the position that they are so as to have the run off from the top drip on the body in an area that is sloping off the car.

I got a couple towels, and a coffee cup, and got rid of the water but had damp carpets to start our trip home. As you all know, dampness inside the car, and a good heater, produce a lot of moisture that condendses on the inside of the windshield. I always kept an old windshield wiper blade in the car to act as a squeege to wipe off the mist. That kept us going that day.

We started home and ran into one of the worst rain storms on the coast in several years. We drove to Ventura in torrential rain all the way. We stayed fairly dry, I had a top that I made, but the foot wells filled up with water again. My feet were soaked, my wife had to hold her feet up to keep them out of the water. I pulled into a parking garage at the Double Tree, where we had lunch, and bailed out the foot boxes again.

I assumed that the water was getting in the car from the same point that it had when it was parked, there was nothing I could do about that at the time.

We continued home in more torrential rain. This was the storm that caused several mud slides in the Mussle Shoals area and we were driving by about when that was happening.

The rest of the trip was the same, we probalbly traveled 240 miles, of the 250, in the heavy rain. The foot wells were full of water again when we got home, and my wifes legs ached from the effort to keep her feet dry.

After a couple days of a fan blowing over the carpets they seemed to dry out. There was no apparent permenant water damage.

Later I found that the fiberglass joint between the rear inner fender liners at the back of the cockpit, in front of the rear tires, was not completely bonded to the under side of the body and the rain was getting in the car from there. I put a coating of resin over the area and never had it leak again.