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, American Sunroof 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 removed 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, 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 removed the panel so I could paint the under side with POR-15.