ltoolio

Was working on cleaning up my sunroof components tonight, and as expected for a 30+ year old car, the sunroof cable was absolutely covered in gunk and grime. There were points on it that I would have sworn it was a solid cable because of how think the dried material on it was.

I started wiping it down with a rag and some WD-40, but it was a very slow process which didn't yield any fast progress.

So, I grabbed a rag (don't get one with loose threads), a can of WD-40, a drill and the dirty cable.



I then thoroughly soaked the rag in WD-40, hooked up the end of the cable in my drill, and tightly grabbed the cable with a gloved hand while wrapping the cable in the rag. I put some good pressure with my thumb (and thumbnail if necessary) and ran the drill.



A few times front and back, maybe 3 minutes total elapsed, and I had a cable that shown brightly and that I could see the individual strands in the cable.



I threw on some white lithium grease, fed it through the tube back and forth, took it out, cleaned it, repeated 2 more times and I'm pretty sure I've got a darn clean assembly.

I'll clean it down one more time tomorrow, let it dry, reapply the lithium grease, reassemble and feel good that I won't have to repeat this (hopefully!) any time soon!