I want to polish and treat roof with ceramic coating protectant. Does the factory full roof rack just unscrew to remove it or is it trickier than that? When I put it back on, do I need gaskets or sealers to prevent water intrusion? Note: Photo is before recent repaint. Thank you.

 

The rails should just screw on. Look down from above the rails. There should be a gasket of some kind under the rails. The "skid strips"(#3), if you have them are just double sided taped on.

 

Thanks for the diagram. Does anyone know if the fastener heads are Philips or Torx or something else? Thank you.

 

It’s a Torx.

 

pretty sure there us rivets in there somewhere too, have a visual, pretty big rivets, would need a tool to install

I need to do a roof rejuve, add a 3 rd bar, and homemade rack, lights etc

 

I had some serious rust issues on my roof from a previous owner doing a bad job of rhino liner to cover up the rust. In the process I sanded the tops off a few of the nuts. I bought some nice stainless steel rivet nuts but couldn’t get them to flare out. Maybe with a really good rivet nut tool I could I dunno. But then I got standard steel ones and they worked. If I did it again I would just use the aluminum ones.

 

Having just repainted my XJ I had to replace a few of the rivet nuts and bols.

I ordered a rivet nut kit from amazon
and replaced the old screws with stainless alen ones.

The rivet nut kit i picked from was:
"weideer 180Pcs Metric Rivet Nuts Assortment..."
(and used the M6 rivet nuts from it, already had a rivet nut plier)
and iIused
"Cicidorai M6-1.0 x 16mm Button Head Socket Cap Bolts Screws, 304 Stainless Steel..."

 

What year XJ is everyone discussing? Would it be the same for a 1992? Thank you once again.

 

1991 two door here. I would think it is the same for all pre-facelift XJ's.

 

Mine is a 2000 and still had the rivnuts. It wasn’t a good feeling when I looked at the hole in my roof and wondered why the hole was bigger and didn’t have any threads. Oops. The rivet nuts are still in-between my roof and headliner. Thankfully I can’t discern their ratting over the other rattles.

 

The racks themselves differ across the model years. My '88 rack is very different from the post '90 models but attaches pretty much the same way.

 

You can see why the fasteners were confusing for me. Five are allen headed and longer and the rest are torx and shorter (see photos). I think the Phillips head was just loose under the rack frame because I ended up with 13 total fasteners when the rack was removed instead of the required 12.

 

It likely a PO changed a few of them for whatever reason.

Although mine is a bit older, the fasteners on the rack are all torx.