Sunroofs are becoming so popular they're are almost standard equipment these days. But, contrary to what you might think you have to do some maintenance on them. Now, that maintenance consists of lubricating anything that moves like this wind deflector here moves up and down. Well it moves on pivot points and every pivot point is a possible wear spot. So you use something like silicone spray or dry lube-or anything like that. You don't use a heavy chassis grease because the chassis grease will keep things too tight. So use the proper grease, lubricate everything including the trolleys that the sunroof moves back and forth on. You do that, probably won’t have any issues with any of those parts.

Next thing is that you have troughs in here. These troughs are in here to collect water. You know sun roofs are typically not water tight. Water comes in, collects in these troughs, and then runs out through drain tubes that are typically positioned in the corners of the sunroof. Now those drain tubes can get clogged up with debris from trees and just general dirt and so on. So you have to clean them. Well, you don’t do that with a coat hanger. One thing that you can do I suppose is you can use an air hose but make sure that the air pressure is turned way down- well under 20psi. Because if you don't what will happen is,  you blow the tubing off of the fitting on the sunroof, then you’ve got a major repair on your hands.

Another thing you can do is everytime you wash the car you could wash this area and put some soapy water down the tube to help keep it clean. The other thing you want you want to get the stuff that makes these things clog up out of there. So you take your shop vac and you always vacuum everything out of this. And that of course, keeps them from clogging up.

Now the other thing that you might be able to use in some cases to clean those tubes is canned air. Canned air is low pressure so you can force it down the tubes and that will clean them out.

Alright, another thing is all of these rubber parts that seal things up, help to keep dirt out, and so on- they should be sprayed with silicone spray to keep them soft and pliable and working the way they should. So, fifteen minutes of preventive maintenance once or twice a year- well it could prevent a lot of future problems with the sunroof. And if you have a question or comment, drop me a line right here at Motorweek.