Wow, that's quite the saga! So much for the quick fix. Were you planning on filling the holes all along or were you going to go with the machine screws and finish washers( a la Dan)? Is rust typical in Georgia or was this just one of those things? Thanks for the input, Greg.
My LX is an original southern vehicle, bare steel will rust here but not like the north east, a body will last a lifetime here as long as it is protected, the rust was from the rack feet and nuserts rubbing through the paint
I did not want to try to plug the holes, if I ever paint this cruiser I'll take the headliner down and have the holes welded,
Sea2skydad,
When you look under the feet of your factory rack then you will very likely see the same thing unless you are very lucky. My truck has lived in low humidity, high altitude, very low annual rainfall, very little snow, and no significant salt on the roads. It's also a late '97 and has had the minimum amount of time exposure to the elements. The nutserts are beginning to rust and the feet have worn through the clear coat and were starting through the paint until I caught it about a year ago.
while we are on the topic again. I did receive those gaskets Imentioned before. They were hand cut from scrap stock of a material that had no adhesive. A complete hatchet job of what I asked for. I'm contacting him next week and will try again to get the product I want. I'm sure he thought he was helping me out by saving me some money, unfortunately I'm more interested in saving my roof.
I've had such a mess trying to remove my roof rack. I had several nutserts spin, and some were allready pulled through the sheet metal by someone else. Getting this fixed right is going to be costly but I might pull all the roof runners, rear deflector, and sun roof visor and have it welded and top repainted. This has really been a total PAI to deal with.
I live in WA, where we don't know what rust is either. I haven't taken the rack off yet, but when I get up to the roof I can see some cloudy discoloring around the roof rack feet indicating there is very likely rust under there. Unfortunately 80 series roof rack rust tends to be a problem even in the non-rust belts.
Shoot, sorry Raven I didn't notice this thread had made it back up until now.. man also sorry you had to endure such a pain getting your rack off. I'll look for those pictures tonight, hopefully I saved them, if not does anyone know how to edit a post to remove the red X's? sucks we lost all the pics with the forum change...
Edit: alright, found my pics, tried to keep the size down so this thread doesn't take a while to load... happy de-racking, everybody!
