More progress. -- Jim
March 27, 2006 Finally, moving on. I glued the loose passenger map pocket to the door skin. Inelegant, but should work. I was careful so that it can be removed fairly cleanly if the pocket should ever get replaced. ...On a freeway test drive today the cruise worked even better than it did at low speed, mostly because the car is less sensitive to throttle variations at higher speeds. Perfectly acceptable, if you ask me. I need to look at the throttle linkage again, it may be that we've lost a little bit of onramp power since I dinked with it while installing the idle cable. It's a pity that other obligations prevented me from tackling the sunroof today, it was beautiful out. It's supposed to rain tomorrow. March 28, 2006 Yep, raining. Adjusted the throttle linkage again to get better access to full throttle. Loosened the ADA screw two full turns. Tried a test drive, no real difference. Car doesn't smoke on heavy acceleration, and sucking and blowing on a line connected to the ADA's port didn't seem to make any difference. I whipped the full-throttle stop four more lashes, just for grins, and drove it again. Not really any different, but I hooked up the MityVac to the ADA, and when I pumped it up to 15", floored it, and then released the vacuum I could feel a surge as the ADA reacted. So, it's not totally dead anyway. The weather cleared up a bit, so I dove into the sunroof. _Very_ sticky, which I could tell once I'd unpinned the operating cable. Can't even slide it by hand, it takes two! Try _that_ while at the same time trying to flip the switch. Anyway, it was painfully obvious that naive attempts to lubricate the sunroof had been done. The two shiny cover rails (with the screw heads in them) that are exposed when the roof is open were caked with what looked like a bad varnish, the remains I suppose of some random lubricant caked with dirt. Of note is that this is a non-bearing surface, and needs no lubrication at all! I put these in the solvent tank while I did the real job. The roof came apart easily enough, having done it before helps. The difficult part is cleaning out the rearward part of the sliding track where it's buried behind the headliner. I used a bit of rag clamped into the end of a straightened coat hanger and dipped in solvent. Fortunately the rear part of the track seems to have escaped the home lubricator. It was fairly clean, especially when compared to the front part of the track. With all of the crud scraped and dissolved out of there, and the same for the sliding feet on the roof panel itself, I lubricated it all with Lubriplate and put it back together. Even after an hour in the solvent tank the rail covers needed heavy scrubbing with a rag to shine up. The roof panel slid easily enough by hand when I put it back in place, so I finished putting all the bolts in and tried it out. It still got stuck at the back, just about as bad as before! WTF? I started taking it back apart, and with it disconnected from the cable and bracket it slid easily enough again. As it turns out, the sliding bracket to which the roof panel screws (and through which runs a tube inside of which is the cable from the motor) needs to be pulled forward out of the car as well. (Run the cable all the way back first.) The inside of this tube was all gummy and was preventing the bracket from sliding easily over the sheath of the cable back under the headliner. I cleaned it out with solvent and lubricated it too. Upon reassembly the sunroof then worked properly. Now for the small tears in the sunroof headliner panel. I took it inside to a table and cleaned off the metal side rails where the glue had failed and the material was loose. I then used contact cement to reglue the panel to the frame. With that done I cut some small pieces of scrap headliner material I had and cemented them behind the tear and the hole that was in the panel. The scrap material was even the right color! Same hole pattern, too, which helped with the hole. It is a bit puckery still and not nearly as invisible as I'd hoped, but I still think it's better than it was. With the hole patched it should no longer draw probing little fingers... A final treatment with Simple Green to clean off the whole panel and then I installed it back in the car. A drop of oil on each metal snap clip helped ease them back into place. Just about done, except for the detailing. (Wash, touch-up paint, wax, clean the interior.) I have had no problems with the battery the entire time, I think its only problem was difficult starting combined with not letting it charge back up. (Especially easy if you didn't get it started!) So I will consider the PO's report spurious and will mark it as taken care of. -- Jim
