97 850 black strip thingies

My dealer knows that I will never buy a car with detailing stripes. In fact a couple times he has taken the stripes off a car at his expense before I would buy it. They are just something else that can go wrong and serves no purpose.

These are the ones along either side of the roof, correct?

I think this is one of those things which is going to fail on each and every one Volvo sold. On my '96 850 they started failing about 2 years ago and are now toast. Our car is silver-grey, so I have just peeled the black plastic off bit by bit and use a bit of rubbing compound to clean up the underlying aluminum. Now I have aluminum colored stripes instead of black. Looks aok to me!

Some have reported success with cleaning the strips, masking them off, then painting with black paint.

Finally, you can change them yourself easily enough. The are just clipped into place. $85 labor per strip to replace them is absurd.

John

Kinda a similar thing:

Last winter one of the big rub strips on a door came off my wife's 97 850. I told her to wait till spring when the thing would not be brittle. It is quite obvious to me now that inside for a day would have worked too, du-uh!

Anyway she lost the strip. A new one from a dealer will not match the rest of the strips on the car, are these available from a junkyard or other suggestions?

Thanks

I would think that you should be able to find them at a junkyard. Time to get out your yellow pages and let the fingers do the walking.

John