Saturday, November 13, 2010

Day 45 – The dreaded rear window frame

Let me just start this with, I hate this rear window frame. On so many chargers this is the worst. This is mostly due to its poor design. The wings that anchor the roof down in the rear of the car on either side of the window tend to trap water in the bottom corners of the rear window. This leads to the sealant that is used to adhere the window to the car to stay wet and eventually rot away. This is where it starts to get expensive, once that has rotted enough to let water through, the water will eat through the paint, then the metal and trickle into the rear plenum which is right below the rear deck lid. Now the way the plenum is designed the water doesn’t stay there, it then trickles down into the trunk floor and there it falls into the crevasses between the trunk floor and the wheel house. So now you have a corner of the window rusted through, so that metal has to be cut, grinded, patched, welded, sanded, and painted. This happens to the corner, plenum, wheelhouse and trunk floor. This issue is pretty common with these chargers which are why most of them have rusted out trunks. So here we have cut away the old rear window frame and will welding in the new one.