This question comes up a lot, for a couple different reasons:
Someone bought a sunroof car but wants to get rid of it for “lightness and stiffness.”
Someone has a hardtop and wants the sunroof – but doesn’t want to butcher the car with some aftermarket monstrosity.
99% of users will not have the skill/tools/means to perform this swap themselves, which is why it is great that C3Sierra_S2000 wrote up the procedure so you can decide whether it’s worth the time, effort and money after all.
Difficulty: *****
Time: days
Cost: $$$$$$$$$$$$$
Materials:
– Sunroof or non-sunroof-equipped donor car
– body filler
– window adhesive
Tools:
– plasma cutter, sawzall or torch
– welder
– power drill
– suitable knife for removing window adhesive
– screwdrivers
Procedure:
1: Remove interior completely. I left the dash but we covered it with a heavy blanket to keep it from being burned by sparks.
2: Remove all the trim surrounding the windows.
3: Remove all the glass. The windshield, rear glass, and side glasses will have to have new rubber seals ordered for them as you have to cut the originals to get the glass out.
4: Drill the spot welds out. The factory roof skin has seams at the front and rear pillars very close to the top of the car. All the other seams are in the glass openings and is completely spot welded on.
5: Remove the roof skin.
6: Reinstall the roof skin whether it be the sunroof one or the hardtop one by welding in at the spot welds.
7:The following is what I found for wiring of the sunroof on a 97 SE.If you installed the factory sunroof the wiring harness plug is at the top of the dash on the right hand side. The factory wiring has the additional 2 wires that you need to make the roof work. The plug is references as R1 and has 4 pins.
Pinouts:
1 R/W Door pin switch ground
2 R/B +12V from battery constant power
3 B Ground to chassis
4 W/B +12V from power window relay ignition switched (approximately 12 gauge wire)
Pin 3 and 4 are what you will have to add to make the dome light and the sunroof work. The sunroof motor grounds itself through the chassis. The small gauge ground is for the dome light.
If your car does not have the wiring needed then you will just need to connect the wiring according to the pinout.
If you bought the sunroof setup from a wrecked car then you have to do the same process on that roof section as well to separate the roof skin from the frame.