The Major appeared with her tonneau cover in two pieces. The lever to unlatch it from its socket in the boot had completely separated from the tonneau cover. It all looked to be in one two intact pieces so should be an easy fix.
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| Broken Landrover Discovery IV tonneau cover |
From the looks of it the latch had wriggled out between the two parts of the cover. There was a large gap between the parts, when compared with the other end,
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| Gap between cover parts |
and on inspection there appeared to be a screw missing.
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A search of the parts box yielded a similarly threaded but slightly longer BZP self-tapping screw.
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| Original (lower) and replacement (upper) screws |
As I wasn't sure it would fit, I put it into the other end from the latch and it went in OK. I then tried to fit the original screw into the latch end hole, which illustrated the underlying problem as it spun round in its hole; a stripped thread in the socket. Swapping the position of the screws around made the fix, as the longer screw cut a new thread deeper into the socket.
JOB DONE
Time taken: 1 hour
Cost : £0.00
This is a nice illustration of the importance of not ditching, recovering from scrap, or not walking past unattended odds 'n' sods fixings. Sometimes you just need one. Supplying it from the parts bin will save a couple of quid each time versus having to go out a buy a pack.
Also tonneau is quite a cool word.
