sunroof fun 'n' games

[toolboy62]

just thought I would share this with everyone... might help someone someday, I dunno.

the sunroof on my 944 was all kinds of screwed up when I bought the car, the PO gave me a gear with the car and said "this is the problem but I don't know how to get it set correctly." Well it took me about a year to get to it (I finally broke down and had to play with it when one corner sucked open at 80 MPH on the highway - that'll scare the crap out of you when you're not expecting it! Bonus if it's raining out...) and about 10 minutes to figure out how to set the gearboxes properly so that the levers would be in sync and working correctly. However I found that the other gear had a missing tooth so I ordered one to replace that.

Today I decided to fix it "right." Here's the thing you may not know. There's apparently a microswitch somewhere in the sunroof assembly that lets the motor know that the roof is on the car, and the motor won't work in one direction if the roof is off (I assume to keep from putting the latches in the "latched" position unless the roof is off.) I only discovered this after sitting there cussing and swearing, running the cable all the way out of the motor, winding it back in manually, lather, rinse, repeat, STRIPPING ONE OF MY NEW @#$@#$%& GEARS and finally breaking down and reading the manual. (the first time I messed with it I didn't take the roof off for some reason.) I don't even know where this switch is, couldn't find it, but sure enough, the car knows when the roof is on and when it isn't.

Sure enough when I set the roof back on everything worked normally. D'oh! (BIG D'oh!)

So I put it back together with the original gear with one tooth missing and it works great. After half a day I'm back where I started. Except one gearbox is missing one of the metal washers and one screw, but I'm sure that the PO lost those not me.

Another tip - the easy way to align the gearboxes is like so. Remove covers and latches, run the motor until it is in the closed and latched position. Put the latches in with exactly four teeth sticking out the back of the gearbox. Install covers and tighten screws. Et voila, you have a properly working sunroof latch system. The guy at the local Porsche shop put the fear of Ferdinand into me what with all the handwaving about how tricky it was to get everything working together properly, and it would cost too much money to pay him to do it because it was such a time consuming procedure so I'd better learn how to do it myself... why did I manage to get it just right after only a few minutes of messing around? Oh well, I won't complain too much... I'm sure there are other things that will fight me to no end.

off to add a sunroof latch drive gear to my Pelican project list...

nate

[flamingeye]

Originally posted by toolboy62


There's apparently a microswitch somewhere in the sunroof assembly that lets the motor know that the roof is on the car,



nate

The micro switch is under the triangular metal shaped cover at the front (centre) of sunroof.

[Porsche944]

Check this out: http://www.pelicanparts.com/techarticles/944_Sunroof/944_sunroof.htm

[NKN84944]

I thought this also functioned to stop the motor when the sunroof was raised all the way, and can be adjusted by setting the pitch of the protruding piece on the actual sunroof by changing the depth of the 4mm hex screws under the caps a few inches back and apart.

[Tapage]

This tip " four teeth out the gear box .. is a valuable tip.

In my case my suun roof up one side more than other .. I thought ( I read Clark's about that ) I have one broken gear.