The Side Curtains were the last thing I did on the restoration. I hope I don't use them very much, but they did need to be done. I bought new rubber, new plexiglass, & a fastener kit from Clarke Spares & Restorations.

I had two sets of side curtains, one from the original car and one from the parts car. They were in about the same condition, but I decided to use the ones from the original car. I sent the front and rear braces out to have them rechromed (probably not original). Not all the aluminum side curtains have the small metal "tab" that is attached to the front upper portion of the window frame, but mine did. It is intended to help keep the side curtain in place at higher speeds. I also had that piece rechromed. I'll be the first to admit that I did a very poor job of cleaning up / polishing the aluminum frames. I did use some metal abrasive compounds, but there were just too many nicks, gouges, & scratches to get them all out. I'm sure a more devoted person could have cleaned them up better, but I rationalized that I wouldn't use them too much and when I did, the weather would be bad and not too many people would notice.

The rebuild was really just a matter of disassembling the old parts and then reassembling with refurbished or new parts with some clean-up thrown in. One problem I had was that the new front plexiglass had the wrong angle at the front. I'm not sure why since these frames have the (somewhat) standard "Weather Shield" name embossed in the upper part of the frame. I know that there were quite a mixture of frames used throughout the life of MGA's so I assume mine were just a little different. The other problem area I had was in getting the rubber along the front edge of the frame to slip into place. It took a lot of pushing, soaping, starting over, etc. to finally get both that part of the rubber in place.

I apparently make a mistake in the location of the front plate that holds the side curtain in position on the left door since the side curtain didn't fit correctly. I initially used a bungie cord jerry-rigged to hold it in place. On our trip to GT-33, we drove through a lot of rain. The side curtains did reasononably well keeping out the rain - better than the top did. However, that set-up did some minor damage to the leather along the top of the door. The bottom line, though, is that we got pretty wet - just like the last MGA I had 40+ years ago. I guess I was right not to expect too much.

After that trip, I ended up using the brace from the other set of side curtains and modified it to fit the door.