Postby edelbrock » August 23rd, 2009, 10:36 am
got some experience with this problem:
Take a flash light and look into the cowl panel (where the wiper arms are) at the inside of the firewall seam. you should see some rust there. what I noticed upon scrapping the front of the 3.5 yr old ranger 4x4 was that the rust appears to be restricted to the cab seams (where the sheetmetal overlaps). Removal of the seam sealant showed no coating underneath. It had the appearance of the cab being sprayed or dipped after the seam sealant was applied...which might still be acceptable if the sealant itself was engineered to be the corrosion solution for the joint. It apparently was not effective. Or might be a bad batch of sealant.
The end result is rust developing inbetween the seams of the cab and showing most prominently in the areas where water runs down from the windscreen into the cowl and inside the fenders. The body panels, doors, tray etc dont seem to have that problem....just the cab shell itself.
Cant tell you how upsetting this was to the owner and the reason I even bother to post anything on this is so that if we do find as consumers that there is a defect on these vehicles that there should be some solidarity for redress of the defective vehicles.
It is ridiculous that the consumer should be required to bust open cab seams on a practically new 200K vehicle and spend another 10k- 18K to effect repairs.
