When I bought [464] last year, everything but the AC worked in the car.  The moonroof, unfortunately, stopped working the day after I got it home.  Mitsubishi, bless their hearts, has always seemed to have a hard time with power moonroofs as far as I’ve seen.  In any case, I got the AC back in the car a couple months back (still need to draft a post about that process), but it wasn’t until today that I managed to fix the moonroof issue.

One nice thing about having TWO Galant VR4s is that I sort of have a spare of everything.  Since [195] can’t have any glass in the roof if it’s going to be a rally car, I had a spare moonroof to swap into [464].  I had previously removed the moonroof from the black Galant and today was a nice sunny day (that wasn’t a billion degrees) to complete the project.
I started with the easy stuff.  The visors came out, then the overhead light and mirror.  After that, I took down the courtesy handles over the non-driver’s doors.  Then things got a bit ridiculous.  As you can see in the picture above, you have to remove the back seat.  Why?  Because, in order to remove the plastic garnish above the doors that helps retain the headliner, you have to remove the trim at the very rear of the cabin on either side.  This is best done by removing the back rest of the back seat.  Of course, to get to the three bolts that hold that part of the seat in place, you have to remove the seat base as well.  Finally, you have to unbolt the lower anchor points for the rear, 3-point belts to get that rear trim out of the car.  Maybe you could do all this without taking out the back seat, but I don’t want to risk breaking 18 year old plastic that I’m not going to be able to easily replace.

I was surprised at how straight-forward this job was once I got past all the tricky trim removal.  When I went to clean up, I found I’d only used 10mm, 12mm and 17mm sockets, a long phillips screwdriver, and a pair of channel lock pliers.  Most of the bolts are 10mm (no surprise there, this IS a Mitsubishi, afterall).  There’s a single 12mm for the back seat upright in the middle, and the seatbelt anchors are 17mm.  I used the pliers to loosen the hose clamps at the drain tubes at all four corners of the assembly.  From there, I disconnected the electrical devices at the front of the moonroof and took down the lateral supports with their 18 or so 10mm bolts.  After that, it’s just four 10mm nuts holding the whole thing in place.  I removed the front two and then began loosening the one on each side.  Then the 70lb+ assembly just sort of falls in your lap.  PRO TIP: Use your head to balance things while you remove the last nut.  Literally.  Use your head.

You can see above that the entire assembly is a fairly large piece of kit.  What makes it tricky is that it’s not evenly balanced.  Odds are good that, when they stop working, the glass and frame are going to be all the way to one end or the other, making it an awkward thing to handle when that last nut comes off.  The one on the left in the picture above is the one that came out of [464], while the one on the right came out of [195].  It might be possible to hulk the replacement unit into place solo, but I asked my wife Vanessa to start the two side nuts while I held it in place.

All said and done, this project took me less than four hours.  I warmed up by replacing the blown rear speakers and I know I started that after 1300hrs, but the car was 100% back together before 1800hrs, and I took many smoke breaks along the way (also checking Twitter because I’m something of a social media whore).

All’s well that ends well.  I still have a leak of some sort under the car that’s not the transmission, so I’m starting to wrap my head around new seals for the transfer case (don’t want a repeat of my Prescott adventures) and/or a new gasket for the oil pan.  Either way, there’s going to be some more maintenance in my future, I can tell.