[earossi]

My sunroof will not lock down on the drivers side and will not go up in the rear. When I hit the activate switch, I can hear the motor run and the passenger lock will unlock/lock. Any ideas before I tear into the thing?

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[DaveN]

One of many things. Possible stripped gear on drivers side. If the motor is running it could also be the limit switch for the stop is not working or out of alignment. See if you can "politely" push up on the roof by the gears whilst opening to get the roof up. Now you can see into the gear a bit and inspect for white plastic bitties.

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[Cloud9...68]

The sunroof drive mechanism is quite a complicated contraption, but once you dig into it a little and understand it, it's not so bad. To me, it sounds like a stripped gear. You can either do what DaveN suggests, or remove the roof panel near the back of the sunroof (held down by seven phillips screws under plastic caps), and then remove the cover over the driver side lift mechanism, which is held in place by five phillips screws. This will expose the white plastic gear, and you'll immediately see if it's stripped. The gears are only $6.51 from Sunset, and they're easy to replace. I'd also check the one on the passenger side.



Clark's garage has a very good description of how the sunroof mechanism works, how to troubleshoot it, and how to to some preventative maintenance in the form of checking the torque at which the slip clutch disengages (a common cause of gear stripping). Go to www.clarks-garage, select site search at the upper left, type sunroof in the search box, and select the top item. Good luck.

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[Scott Collins]

+1 on Clarks Garage



It is an overly complicated "contraption" - I wish that I could just replace the entire thing with a couple of old-fashioned clasps that would lock in the open position or in the closed position. It would save weight as well



Also, if you are doing the sunroof job for the first time yourself, double down on the plastic gears order. One or more may be "sacrificed" through "trial and error". Then you will have no gears remaining, but you will also have the assembly and roof panel in many pieces on cardboard on your garage floor. It's not like you can bop over to Pep Boys and pick up some more gears to finish the job. How do I know this? Hmmmmmm.....



Good luck.



Scott

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[Cloud9...68]

+1 on the risk of stripping your brand new gears through trial and error. I set the torque to around 5 Nm, but left it where it locks and unlocks the sunroof very nicely, but it won't raise it to what I consider the utterly useless vent position. I think it needs a little more torque before the slip clutch slips to allow it to raise to the vent position, but in my mind, it's safer to leave the torque slip setting on the low side to reduce the chance of stripping a gear when retracting the lift arms to unlock the sunroof, and sacrifice the ability to raise to the vent position.

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[Darryl]

Cloud...most of the time the sunroof doesn't raise the whole way due to the switch at the front being disengaged. Rhudeboye showed me that trick a while back. If the sunroof stops opening prematurely, press the switch inbetween the visors and then press the "up" button again. My bet is that it will go up the rest of the way.



It isn't the torque that prevents it from lifting but either the limit switch being made or the safety switch dropping out.



- Darryl

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[Cloud9...68]

Darryl - Thanks for the input. I'll give your suggestion a try. But what has me concerned is that there is a sort of grinding noise coming from the back when I try to move the sunroof to the vent position, which I (optimistically) interpreted as the slip clutch disengaging. But I'm afraid it could be something worse (like the cable working its way loose?), so I decided not to try it again. Ideally, I would like it to work, though, even though the vent feature isn't something I ever use.



Here's another mystery. The sunroof switch is again operating backwards! In other words, pressing the rear half of the switch locks the sunroof, and pressing the front half unlocks it, allowing it to open! To me, this actually makes more logical sense (front to open, back to close), but it is the opposite from what is written on page 53 of the owners manual, and opposite from the way it worked before I started all this troubleshooting. It's physically impossible to put the console switch in backwards, so I can't imagine what could be causing this reversal of direction. Any ideas?



Sheesh, after the 20 or so hours I must have put into troubleshooting this Rube Goldberg contraption, I'm sure timing the cams would be like a walk in the park!

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