The recent trip to TX was a little hard on the CRD. Had a guy in a Nissan Titan pickup throw a rock in my windshield (his rear tires, not him personally) hard enough to crater and crack both layers of glass on the way down just west of Texarkana. And on the day prior to my intended return, had an elderly lady in a '98 Lincoln Navigator pull out in front of me less than 2 car lengths away from a side street trying to make a left hand turn across 2 lanes of traffic on a rain slick street in San Marcos. Crumpled up the front edge of the hood, cracked up the plastic grille and bumper, and shoved back the bracket supporting the hood latch. Stopped short of shoving anything around in the radiator area or bending anything structural. ABS worked well enough slowing me down from 40 mph that no airbags deployed and that the contact was more of a jolt than a crash. Guess the critics were right about the stock Goodyears having poor wet weather traction.
Side of that Lincoln seemed to have gotten the worst of that encounter. As my friend, a longtime diesel and Dodge Cummins fan said, "If you had to hit something, at least it was a Ford!"
Anyway, today I got the CRD back from the body shop, the damage from the accident repaired, and a new windshield installed.
Wasn't until I got home and looked that I noticed something extra at the top of the windshield. A rubber weatherstrip along the top edge of the windshield. WTF? There wasn't anything there originally when I bought the CRD, it came from the factory with nothing more than a recessed gap between the top of the hood and the windshield. I thought this was just something peculiar to KJ's with the way the windshield was designed.
Now I'm wondering, was this CRD built on a Friday afternoon, and someone at the factory just simply forgot to install the weatherstrip at the top of the windshield (like they forgot to flush all the sand out of the cooling system and oil sump), or is this a running change since '05 to add this weatherstrip?
I tend to believe that the original windshield wasn't properly installed. Turn on the heat on a cold day, or the A/C on a hot day, and it audibly creaked and popped from the temp changes. And the way that the cracks from that rock kept growing straight up the middle of the glass, as if it was under stress and trying to split in two down the middle.
The new windshield is solid and quiet as a churchmouse.
Is this top weatherstrip a running change, or did someone at the factory just flat out screw up and forget to put it on?
