Hi Guys,

I am a new member on this forum and I have been reading the Articles section with great interest. My car is an 1986 XJ-SC in Regent Grey and a 1973 Mercedes 450 SEL in beige.

What I am missing is an article about material and care advise for the Cabriolet top (not the Convertible!).

I have posted about this on the Jag Lovers forum but no one has replied there, so I am dropping the same text here as well in hope that someone might know:

I am in the process of finding out which material has been used by Jaguar for the XJ-SC Cabriolet, in order to determine how to correctly clean, re-color (if possible) and protect it. (My car is a 1986 XJ-SC with a black top, believed to be stock).

From reading all the posts about this topic in the Lag Lovers Forum I am still missing a clear information on if it is vinyl or fabric or something “in between”. I am saying this since even though the top of my Jag looks like fabric, it still does not show the typical behavior like other fabric tops when doing the water rubbing-in test.

A lot of confusion is coming from the fact that both many Jaguar drivers and also upholstery shops / online sources I have checked out are referring to the material used for the XJ-S Convertible (Sonnenland fabric), but do not take into account that the XJ-S convertible top was designed in conjunction with Karmann in Germany, while the XJ-SC top was designed by Jaguar alone (probably just like the black roofs of the XJ12C). Another difference to the convertible is that the XJ-SC has the black top material applied in two different ways, to the roof sheet metal parts (hence my comparison to cars like XJ12C) and the rear fold-down (convertible style) section.

So if anyone here has a better insight into this or can point me to a source I could contact to obtain the knowledge about material type and care that would be much appreciated.

Thanks much!

Dirk