Recently my sunroof flap began to vibrate while driving, and being a sunroof maniac (both because it's always open and because I have fully removed mine multiple times to repair it) I figured I would silence it last saturday. Having read other posts from brickers about this annoyance, I thought I'd post my results.

While I've disassembled the unit (and even done intra-year analysis on the design), I've never really thought about the wind flap... it was alwasy just kind of there. Anyway, my first assumption drawn from incidental "looks" at the piece was that the responsibility for anti-rattle lay with the two horizontally mounted springs under the flap (parallel to flap). They just looked weak and responsible.

However, when I pulled all the parts I noticed that a cout hanger looking piece of metal was sticking out from under one of the retaining arms connected to the sunroof. I had thought these arms were only responsible for pulling the flap down, but this proved incorrect. After disassembly of the arms it turns out that there is a premolded piece of steel (white metal coat hanger in dimensions) that is curved to bendup into the arm and provide resistance. It also turns out that these pieces and their accompanying brackets aren't stainless, because the whole damned thing was rusting like mad. One of the pre-molded pieces actually snapped as I was playing with it.

Anyway, the solution was just to uncouple the retaining arms from the flap (you have to push the flap to a straight up position to do this with it in place), push the arms up out the way, remove the pre-molded resistance piece, bend it appropriately so that it is forcefully "loaded", and reinstall. Once this is completed you may notice your flap riding high and failing toclose properly... generally a side effect of pushing the flap up to get it unhooked and playing with it over time. Just put two blocks under the outside edges of the flap (screw driver handles work well) and gently flex the entire flap down so that its overall shapes doesn't ride quite so high in the middle. Close and open the sunroof after each small flex to make sureyou don't overdo it... you only want it to just clear the sunroof edge. (you could also solve this by altering the bend in the retaining arms themselves, bending them up so the sunroof contacts and drives them down farther earlier, but that metal is a three way piece and much more resistant to general "flexing".)

If you need to replace the pre-molded steel first bet is a junkyard brick, second bet is the hardware store (you just need a piece of thin and lightly maleable steel in the appropriate dimensions), final is volvo (maybe they should be first, but something tells me they don't supply this piece separately). I should also note that the job is slightly easier if you remove the retaining arms entire connection bracket. To do this just loosen the screws that hold teh runner down and gently flex it up about 1/3". The connector can be finnagled out without full removal.

End result is an absolutely quiet windflap. Hope this helps.

-Rick