[Offgrid]

As you guys know, it is a 1988 740 saloon, and the sunroof was taped up with heavy duty bitumen tape. It's been like an oven in the car on some days recently, so I decided that I would try to get the sunroof back into service. I always seem to be over-confident in my abilities, and I decided that all it needed was the cleaning of the gutter drains. I removed the tar strips, and that was an easy job. Underneath was some hessian type adhesive tape, so I removed that - another doddle of a job. Now the truth was revealed. The previous owner's "mechanic" had injected mastic into the gap around the whole of the sunroof panel. It took me 2 hours to cut it out, and now the seal is not in as-new condition. There is still some mastic in the mechanism, and I have to hold the flappy bit in front down with a screwdriver to close it. Yes, I did manage to revive the motor, which just needed a replacement fuse.

There are some really good maintenance videos I've watched, and I'll try to clean up everything. I suspect that I'll have to remove the sunroof to do this. I'm also going to need some new rubber seals, and I'm shocked to see that some sellers are charging up to £80 for these. Do I really need a Volvo part, or can I buy some suitable rubber strip to make the seals?

This is probably not the most important job to be done on this car, so I'm wondering if I should just tape it up again, and leave the job for Ron ( I expect you guys know about Later Ron). I love the sunroof, and I would really like to restore it, but it has turned out to be a much larger job than I anticipated.