Since I had the seats down off the roof of the car and I had run out of
sheet metal to weld into the floor, I decided to take a look at the power
sunroof. There isn't much wrong with the sunroof. The weather strip is dried
up and cracked so I just removed it. There was copious rust behind that
though so I decided to treat the area with Corroless rust stabilizer. I'll
top coat that with black paint to hide the distinctive orange Corroless.
I'll lubricate the cables and slides with Rust Check libricant because it
stays around a long time and it "creeps" into cable sheathes to improve
coverage.
I fixed up around the edges but then I realized that the drive mechanism had
more troubles than I had anticipated. You see, IMO, Chrysler did a poor
engineering job on the drive on this sunroof in one particular way. The
sunroof slides using a type of cable that looks like a really long spring.
This cable is then pulled along by a small drive sprocket in the middle at
the front.
In order to provide a "slip clutch" mechanism so that when the slide reaches
the end of its travel and the operator still has his finger on the button,
they made it so that the cable would just lift away from the drive sprocket
and rattle away in there. The trouble with that is, after a number of years,
the sprocket will wear away at the cable and flatten it out in the area
where it is slipping.
When I remove the cover from the drive sprocket I noticed that someone had
at some time installed a shim front and rear so as to hold the cable against
the drive sprocket. The shims were bent and worn so I fabricated new shims
from, using material from a coffee can. This made the roof slide better but
not perfect. In searching for something else that might help the situation,
I noticed how the movable panel would come out. I remove the panel so I
could paint the under side with POR-15.
http://www.nybclub.org/membercars/bradhogg/76NYB/sunroof.htm
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