We owned Maudette for roughly 5 days when the first thing break on it 😀

Here is what happened: the boot struts were weakened and when I tried to lift the boot, my hand automatically went to the place where the arrow points to grab the boot and lift it up. This however is not the right place to grab  it..  Some plastic snapped, and the whole panel got somewhat loose. It was still obvious that we won’t loose it on the road, but the repair was imminent.

After this we were very careful when opening the boot, not to touch it in the wrong place and do more damage. But because we had plans to go away for the weekend, we postponed the repair until next week.  We went away to visit some friends, and picked them up to go to have brunch… and this is when my friend wanted to put something in the trunk, and grabbed the boot exactly where the arrow points once again, breaking 2 more plastics that were holding the assembly together.

Here is a very good illustration of what is going on courtesy of Steve: basically the first 3 screw holding plastics in line “B” were broken. Thanks to facebook groups and this forum post  I quickly found what we need to do.  This post mentions a 3D printed plastic bit, that can be glued to the back of the panel, and making a very good hopefully permanent solution to this problem.

Here are some photos:

First we took apart the panel based on the above drawing, placed the bubble wrap as extra safety, so the boot cannot be closed by any accident.

Of course, I forget to make the photos of the new bits being glued in place.  We used the 2 component Qbond for this purpose. So far so good!

P.S. Also changed the boot struts to some new ones, and now it´s easy to open the boot.