So everyone is familiar with the spoiler problems that 3rd gens have. everything I have read seems to say that the spoiler's foam degrades, causing the separation from the trunk lid. others say the trunk lid rusts.

I recently repaired mine using epoxy and bolts.
however, mine seemed to have pretty good foam, but what appeared to be metal brackets on the spoiler had rusted away, causing the original clips to be useless.
Is this "normal," and i have just misread the threads/statements? Or do I have a weird spoiler on my car. I believe it to be OEM, it has a date stamp of '91 on it, and it is foam.
just asking for education purposes.

 

I've recently been spending some time in the local bone yard and have had access to several worn out Max spoilers. I've got a couple pictures for people to see.

The first is a shot of the underside of one of the sides where it SHOULD have some sort of mounting. Obviously they're gone, rusted away.



I'm pretty sure that if you cleaned out those mounting holes you could get enough purchase to cast some new mounts using something like shore 90 urethane and some bolts with fender washers cast into them. That would solve the problem of the ends coming up.

The REAL problem seems to be what the next picture shows. At the local pull-a-part there have been many 3rd gens with totally trashed wings. I took the liberty to snap one open (it was already unuseable). Here's that picture.



This shows the interior construction is made of three steel tubes with a steel plate that runs the length of the wing, surrounded by a rubbery-foam. This is all incased in a colored vinyl casing.

My theory is that water seeps in from cuts and tears in the wing. Also from the underside of the side mountings. You can see from the first picture that Nissan used both the mounts and double sticky tape. You can also see there are WIDE gaps between the pieces of tape where the water can seep through. One last, but slower method is soaking through the vinyl casing itself once the paint and vinyl casing have been scorched by enough UV to become porous. Once inside the wing it's much harder for the water to leave so it just sits inside and eats away at the mounts and steel plates & rods. In areas that get below 32 degrees the water will also expand when frozen, and contract when it unfreezes having much the same effect on the foam as it does on concrete.

It's just a theory though......

 

quite normal. did you do it the way we talked about? pics plzzzzzzz b/c i found a rotted spoiler that is in decent shape except for the clips came out

 

yeah, i did, and discovered a couple of issues i would have done differently
I am "testing" atm, making sure it will hold. if that's okay, i will definitely post pics. I also wanted to make sure that this was the norm, before i started a wild trend that was ultimately useless(hafta pump my ego sometime)

 

I took mine off but now i have gaping holes which i will electrical tape