I know a little about stampings. The ridges are there for added strength in the sheet metal. Take a 12" x 12" piece of FLAT sheet metal. Try to bend it, any direction. Bends very easily. Now, put a slight bend down the center of that piece of sheet metal, and try to bend it, AGAINST that bend, not with it. The bend increases the bending resistance of the metal probably at least ten times. I know they're a pain in the ars when cleaning etc. , but they are definitely strength adders. If they were'nt there the large piece of sheet metal that is our roof would bend so easily it would make your head shake. Trust me on this guys. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but working as an engineer in metal forming for 16 years will give you a little insight.



IL6fan

 

Yep, what a pain... But, it's just another example of the manufacturer saving "a-buck-or-2"; those ridges are another engineering marval... You stamp the steel so as to "stiffen" the body panel, to make up for the thinner sheetmetal, and to decrease the need for any additional or more substantial bracing of the bodypanel. If the body panel didn't have the "ruffles" then the first soccer/basketball/baseball impact on the roof would leave it looking like a hugh moon crater !

 

IL6fan has it. The formations are there make the roof rigid. Without them, the roof would flutter at high speeds and over rough roads and the sound in the truck would be very annoying. Even double thickness sheet metal would not solve the issue, maybe even make the sound louder. Also, the truck has a maximum GVW that can either be cargo or body sheet metal, the more sheet metal/aluminum/plastic in the body, the less load carrying capacity. FYI, the floor, doors, backpanel all have formations too, even the bed floor has them.

 

Yes, they are there for stability no doubt, but there's no reason they had to stamp them in. They could have just as easily stamped them out/up, and reduced the water holding properties...

 

Stamping them up and out would have been more costly. The cost of machining the dies would have greater, thus putting more time and cost in the tooling, and guess who would have paid for that?
I personally think they would look rather hokey if they stuck above the roof line. Would have created wind noise too.
Just my 2 pennies worth.
You guessed it I work in a FoMoCo stamping plant...

 

Why would the cost have been any greater? They already had to machine the dies to create what's there now. I didn't mean retool, just do it that way to begin with. and a depression can cause just as much wind noise as a bump, usually more. I would like to know if they actually tested such a thing in a wind tunnel maybe...

 

There is definietely a reason for them because if you've looked at them closely they are interesting. The depth changes from the front to the back of the aft ridge and also the front smaller ridge is shallower then the aft ridges. This leads me to believe there is a reason and ford did test in some sort of controlled environment.

 

I too agree these channels are a pain in the arss. I have a regular cab, and the paint in those grooves keeps cracking on me. I took my truck in to get my entire roof resealed and repainted. That looked good for like 2 weeks. Then the cracks showed back up. I am assuming the roof does a little bending in rough conditions because the cracks are right down the inside edge corners of the channels. I think hitting dipps at 30-40 mph has NOT helped the roof from cracking

just my $.02

 

Yep, I have an '03 f150 with those channels. Didn't worry about them until recently when I noticed they are ALL rusting at the ends. You know, the ends where the roof curves down and the windshield pokes up so there are little puddles. The sort of puddles where water might, I don't know, perhaps *collect*? And having collected there with no provision for draining, might create rust?
Hmmmmmm..... design fail.

And it all could have been avoided with a little bitty sideways tube to let the water escape.

But no, let's make millions of truck owners spend millions of dollars fixing rust, that's much easier. /s


Seriously though, has anyone experimented with filling in those obnoxious little channels after you fix the rust? Maybe just the curved down spots where the puddles are worst? I imagine you would have to use something flexible. Maybe I'll get a few gallons of silicone...

 

Now the channels face upward...no more holding water!

 

Note the roof channels.

 

+1 for cracked paint in the roof gutters. I'll be on my 2nd roof paint job in 4 years. This time, the entire truck is getting a color swap. White has gotten boring

 

.... too bad about all the millions of F150 owners who have a durable truck that will last for many years with rusty roof channels.
I sure wish Ford would offer some sort of remediation for their incredibly bad design.

As for me, I'm thinking of doing the roof with truck bed liner - it's flexible and tough so maybe will hold up better than regular paint.

 

Someone should come up with a skin that could be welded on over the ridges to create a completely smooth roof. When my truck got repainted we were gonna do it to each recess individually but it would of been very labor intensive so we put the kabosh on that idea.

 

Ive been thinking of drawing in CAD channel caps that could be water jet cut and welded individually to cover the channel, it would still be labor intensive to do each one individually though.