Rain rain, GO AWAY (and quit filling up my car!)

Urg... it's been on hell of a wild few weeks up here. Record breaking snow, record breaking rain (month of November), record breaking lows (first week of December) and now record breaking winds, in what amounted to a category 1 hurricane slamming Washington! I still say Al Gore is having cannibus flashbacks.

So.. of course.. this is the BEST time of year for the car to start leaking... A LOT. Drips where exiting the headliner right over my left shoulder, streaming water down the front of my seatback and also into the rear footwell. And it was just getting worse and worse.

I noticed that one of the sunroof seals looked like it was not perfectly matching up... and the more I looked at it the more I wondered how that all worked! Well.. I tried some silicon. Worked for a bout a week, then the leaks were twice as bad!

Finally, I decided to order new sunroof seals (about $80.00 worth of parts) and planned to have the local shop do the install, being as I was in no mood to screw around with them in this weather... fudge something and be right back where I started. Easier to out-source it and if it's fucked up, THEY have to fix it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks (up to thismorning to be exact) and I stumble cross a post to Rennlist when this all started. What did I find? 4 responses that said I needed to check the drain tubes. "Drain tubes?" I asked?

Yes, well it appears that the seals around the sunroof are NOT designed to hold out the water but instead designed to keep out the crud. The way it's supposed to work is the drain tubes at the rear of the roof channel the water down in the C-pillars to a pair of exits right above the engine compartment. And to fix this problem, all you need to do is run some insulated wire up the tubes and.. .well.. if it's not glued shut.. you should be able to clear them!

A spool of speaker wire I had handy did not do the trick. So it was out into the holiday traffic (I'd been at home all weekend building web and other intel gathering servers for an anti-fraud project). FUN! NOT! At least Radio Shack was close by, and distanced from the mall and sure.. you pay 3x what you should but.. it's HANDY.

$15 later and 10 minutes of performing my best imitation of an automotive Protologist.. and I have clear drain tubes. I just hope that was the problem. Being near Seattle I doubt I'll have long to wait before I test it.

I don't have pictures of what I did... really.. nothing to see other than some wire snaking around insite the roof (snooze). Maybe I should dig up those pictures of the snow.. that *might* be interesting.