first all of i'd like to add a bit of a disclaimer here.
my drains were obviously blocked so it was good to clear them out. however, a couple of days later i spent about 4hours driving (with a few hours parked) in extremely heavy rain. the next day my boot was quite wet inside. this is the only time in 2.5years that i have had a damp boot, so for some reason clearing these drains has moved something that has let water in. i'll need to find out where and sort it
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anyway, onto the drains.
to test how your drains are, park the sol on a slight downslope and get a bucket of water. slowly tip the water onto the boot lid near the corner and let the water flow into the corner (as shown below). if the drains are ok the water will slowly drain away. if not, it will just gather and turn into a small pond
this is where you're looking at:
once you realise the water isn't draining out enough, you need to remove the sail panel.
this is done by remove the high level brake light (or, the blank plate):
i'm not sure how the blanking plate comes off, but with the brake light you need to gently prise the little red covers off. use a small screwdriver on the bottom edge (be careful, they break easy). then undo the 2 screws behind the covers and then pull hard on the whole panel so it looks like this...
once that is out the way, you have 2 screws on each sail panel. one at the top under the panel you've just removed and one you access from inside the boot (i didn't take pics
).
then you have to prise the sail panel off. start at the top and slowly work your way down till it's off:
now you can see where the drain is...uh oh, mine is blocked badly
:
at this point malcolm set up his air compressor. we put some water down the drain to try and stick all the dirt together. put the compressor in and with a blast of air it fired the dirt out the bottom with a satisfying splat
. if you now pour water down the drain you should see it nicely drain out from underneath the car. you can now put it all back together and know your drains are clean.
however, there's a few bits that you might need to be careful with:
now, i'm not sure where the holes (red circles) lead to, but the little rubber seals were very brittle on mine. the top one actually fell apart and wasn't re-used
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where the green circle is, the white plastic thing is just a locator. it's to keep the end of the sail panel in place. for some reason, honda drilled a hole into the panel to stick that in. this hole leads into the boot so if any water gets under that it will leak into the boot. might be worth to put a wee bit of silicon around that to prevent water getting through.
on my car, both the locators seemed to be nice and firm and obviously i had no problems with water in my boot before so i just kept them as they were. the only thing that has changed is that i didn't re-use the brittle rubber seal that came from where the top red circle is. i had moisture on both sides of the boot, so i don't think it's from that but if not, i don't know what else it can be.
maybe it was just because it was such a bad rain storm and was just a coincidental one off.
either way, i hope this how-to helps
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if you think i can improve on this just let me know and i'll edit bits.
cheers,
Cam