lweinmunson

I've had a pretty good leak in the rear window of my car since I got it. Appears as 4 big drips/runs at the top of the window. I finally got time this weekend to start pulling it out to see what I'm dealing with on it. I went to Harbor-Freight to get one of their little trim kits for about $12. It has the 4 or 5 tools to pull window and door trim off of cars. The bit I needed looks basically like an arrow. After removing the bottom trim held on by a few screws in the trunk, you just hook the arrow under the trim and slide it up until it stops on a clip. A small rocking movement will get the trim to pop up from the clip. All told I think it took me about 5 minutes to get all the trim from around the back window. Not too bad since I'd never done it before. Then the fun part. Getting all of the old sealant out of there. They make a few different tools to do this, either a bit of wire on a pair of dowels that you can poke through or a big hook to dig into the sealer and pull it out. I just used the trim tool to get it out. I pushed one side of the arrow down into the sealer next to the glass and pulled to towards me, making a few trips around the window until it felt pretty easy to pull around. the I went around a few more times at kind of an angle under the glass to finish breaking the seal. ***Warning, the following is probably the stupid way to do it.*** One of my other hobby's is stained glass/glass fusing so I'm fairly comfortable with how much pressure glass can take. If you don't feel comfortable with that, or don't have money to buy new glass if you screw up, I wouldn't try this. Starting at the corner I very gently snuck the tool under the glass and twisted to get the glass to raise a little. Then I took a screwdriver and went along the raised glass to break free the last of the remaining sealer. I did this first all from the corner to the halfway point and then down to the bottom, repeating from the other side. I left the bottom for last.



Once I could tell it was free I did the same thing for the bottom of the window. Then it was just a simple matter of hooking the tool under the glass to raise it completely vertical. There was still just a bit of gunk holding it down on the bottom so I lifted straight up to break the seal. I would say this thing probably weighs in around 40 pounds so you better know where you're going to store it before you do the final lift. And all those trucks you see carrying glass around do it vertically for a reason. It's much stronger vertically than it is horizontally. So don't think about putting a pill or blanket on the floor and laying it down there. Just a slight blow or too much weight will crack it.

The odd thing I noticed was that it looked like an attempt had been made to reseal the window sometime in the past. I had a clear layer of silicon caulk on top of a black sealer. What I thought was very strange was that under the black sealer was some sort of fabric. Did they lay it out like this at the factory? I thought they just used a big caulk gun to squirt down a bead of sealer before dropping the glass in place. I would think that the fabric would act as a moisture wick and get in between the metal and the sealer.

Once I scrapped off the remains of the sealers and fabric and unhooked the trim clips from their studs I saw lots of rust scale all around the channel, but no really big obvious gaps. So I started wire wheeling it all down and so far I'm pleasantly surprised by how much metal is left there. I've only gotten a little bit of it down bare, but so far I haven't found anything that's going the need an actual patch welded in.




Maybe once I get all this sealed up I can start to work on the interior a little bit.