How to - Drying her out.

The interior of an MGF (or any convertable) is inherintly damp, parked up over winter ours had become so damp that the inside of the windscreen looked more like the showerscreen after one of our teenage daughters had been in there for the required 45 minutes.

This was the perfect enviroment for mildew and mold, not ideal for a plesent driving experience.

I had heard somewhere that one could leave a cup of dishwasher salt in the car.
However we use all-in-one dish washer tablets so I tried rock salt instead.
We have a bag for when it snows so I created a trough using a 4 litre milk carton by cutting a section out from below the handle.

I put a couple of handfulls of the rock salt in and left it on the heated kitchen floor (a radiator will do) until completly bone dry and then left this in the footwell of the car.

1 month later the car is dry with only the same level of condensation on the screen as forms overnight in a tin top that is used daily and the rock salt has picked up so much moisture that it is wet to the touch.

The next stage will be to create a spill proof salt container that can be left in the car while driving, proberbly by using another milk container with holes punched in the top half and secured discretly behind the seats.

Great idea...My MGF was left out in the snow for months and the undercarpet underlay sound deadening ended up saturated.After some head scratching I put it in the washing machine on a spin cycle,then gave it an hour in the tumble dryer.It came out dry and fresh and I have had no damp in the car since.

Or stick a de-humidifying unit in the car.:lol:

david aiketgate wrote: Or stick a de-humidifying unit in the car.:lol:

more expensive than a handful of rocksalt and a used milk container.

And they tend to have standing water in them rather than locking moisture into the rock salt.

True, but an electric de-humidifier would be a lot faster.
You can buy dehumidifier kits that are just Calcium Chloride crystals in a fancy plastic box.

We used to use Silica gell crystals in the laboratory. The advantage of that is that you can reuse the crystals by heating in an oven at 105 C degrees for an hour to drive off the gathered water. The stuff we used changed colour when it was full of water. (red/blue).

Rock salt is generally white when bone dry and reddy pink when wet.

And £7 for 35 kg.