The moonroof on our '84 Townace ('Royal Lounge') leaks -- but only when we move off. If it sits in the rain, no water comes in, but as soon as we pull away, it pours in past the front left corner of the inner shade.

I looked on townace.com, and the suggestion there is to make sure that the drain outlets up there aren't clogged up. As far as I can tell, they're fine -- if I carefully pour water into the dip leading into the drains, then it drains away and appropriate amounts of water come from the underside of the van a few seconds later.

As far as I can see, it should either work perfectly, or not work at all -- what I think is happening is that water is getting in there, not draining all the way out for some reason, and then sloshing down through the inner light shade which isn't water-tight at all. But if that's what happens now, how could it ever have worked? There doesn't seem to be enough 'stuff' in there to force water to go through the drains, so there may well always be something stuck in there. That said, the amount of water that leaks in is a lot more than I'd expect to just be sitting around because it hasn't drained away yet.

So I have two questions:

1. What might cause this to only happen on one side? The right-hand side is always fine -- maybe it's just the slope of the road that causes the water to accumulate on the left when parked, but I can't see what's going on inside the roof before it's going to leak without opening it, so it's a bit of a guess there.

2. Is there anything I can do to fix it? I can't see anything that's wrong, though obviously I'm missing something. The only solution that comes to mind is to close the roof and put some sort of waterproof tape around the edge of it to stop water even getting into the drains, but that seems like overkill.

thanks,

-- dan

- (#9094) Dan Mitchell, 16 Jun 03 4:16

Now I know why it leaks -- water gets in and accumulates inside the roof in the recess where the sliding moonroof goes to -- so as soon as there's any
deceleration when we drive off, all the water sloshes back out of the roof and pours into the van.

How can I get at the insides of there to fix it? Presumably there should be a drain or something back there, but it seems pretty inaccessible, there's normally the sliding roof panel in the way, after all.. Could I just (say) pour boiling water back in there to try and get whatever's there out with heat, or could that end up breaking something?

- (#9307) Dan Mitchell, 23 Jun 03 17:36

The drain points should have plastic pipe ends underneath the bus. See where the front drainage comes out, and look for similar near the rear. Some careful rodding and you should come through to the roof, 2 meters of curtain wire (the springy stuff), should do it.
- (#9308) Clive, 24 Jun 03 1:34

After a lot of poking around from both the inside of the roof and the outlet at the back (thanks for the suggestion!) I located where the blockage appears to be -- and the amount of wire I can get in goes to almost exactly the same position as where there's been a past repair of some sort to the door frame. I don't know what happened to it when that repair went on, but I reckon whatever it was probably ended up blocking/crushing/in some other way messing up the drainage pipe.

Solution 1 would be to go to a body shop and get them to poke around inside where the repair was, then re-do it afterwards; what we're going to do for now is just tape the roof shut and rely on that to keep the water out until we decide if we really need to open it or not.

- (#9419) Dan Mitchell, 1 Jul 03 0:30