Tried closing my trunk not realizing it was too filled, now my left side does not sit flush with the rear quarter panel. Is there anyway to 'realign' the trunk fitment? Took the liner off and seems like its just a hydraulic system with no adjustments.

Any help would be great!

Photos show the uneven side, even side and the about half inch gap that there is now

is that with stuff in it or with an empty trunk?

My GS400 trunk on passenger side sits up 1/4 too high...... I just took a minute to look at the arm and try to spot any adjustments, and did not see any with a quick look... when the trunk is closed you can push on the high spot and it levels out. I will spend a little more time and see if I can find anything on mine, AliIS - perhaps there are some similarities in our issue here. If I get in there and find anything that allows for adjustment I'll post.

Your issue happened after your trunk got closed on some extra luggage but now it's stuck there. That may be what happened to mine in the past with someone closing it on a bit of extra boot, it was like this when I got mine. Good to know, I had not even considered that but it happens all the time.

You mentioned a hydraulic system in yours - With passive hydraulics, sometimes a weak cylinder can cause misalignment or stress epsecially when working the system or stressing it. It doesn't seem logical but - if you remember the old 70's chevy pickups with creases in the hoods where they got bent? That was from weak hood springs, causing the person closing the hood to exert more pressure on it to close the hood and thus creasing/bending that heavy *** hood just because the springs wore out. Maybe that is what we have going on here.

Thanks for posting, we will get this pinned down eventually.

The pictures are with an empty trunk. I spoke to a friend who is the service manager and said that service can perform the adjustment for free usually if I have a "something something something".

That's exactly the case with mine - push it down and it realigns, then returns to the gap. I can even lift it higher by pulling up on the trunk and it returns only marginally which makes me assume its something to do with the hydraulic opening and closing system. I looked at the "nuts and bolts" and everything is tight and secure.

I remember back in the day taking my Corolla trunk off for a custom install and there were a 3 level adjustment in the middle but that car had no hydraulic system. It rained a bit and its definitely getting inside , any help would be appreciated!

I would guess you bent the deck lid. It would give long before the hinges would move. Bending it back won't be fun, and it may not work. Does any of the bracing on the underside the deck lid looked bent upwards?

Deck lid is perfect on mine and not bent - Ali's looks straight too. If you gently press it down it will realign.

Found one on CL with adjustments on a Lexus https://www.clublexus.com/forums/sc-...djustment.html. Don't know if this is same as yours Ali since different model. Looks like mine has spring rods/tension rods. I sent a message to a friend at dealership and he said he'd like to take a look at it so we will do that this week and at least look for an answer in the gs platform, that might help with yours too.

The deck lid is not bent...I barely closed it before realizing it was too full. There are no kinks or anything. If I push down slightly it completely realigns.

Lexus of Oakville said its not something out of the ordinary. Their bodyshop is wanting about $275 to realign it. My worry is not the payment...my worry is that the adjustment is a simple thing I can do myself.

No way!!! We will figure this out! Keep your $275 and you will find that adjustment yourself. Even better is that you know how it happened (trunk full of goodies pushed it up a bit).. so you can logically trace the misadjustment easier. I've been neck deep in bodywork projects and gathering together all of my car audio stuff for an upgrade on my GS so I have not been much help as far as sticking my head into my own trunk for 30 minutes and finding what is up with mine, but eventually we will get it. At least by this Sunday:

My close friend of many years is a master mechanic (GM). If i can't figure something out car-wise I ask him and we find the problem. I texted him about your deck issue and my deck issue and he would like to look at mine when he comes over this Sunday the 15th for our weekend long range binary target session. So that night or the following day I will have something beneficial for us. We may even have similiar adjustment setups. Keep dat money!!!

Ya I'm definitely leaving it until I see what your response is and hopefully figure it out on my own rather than the dealer or their body shop.

Looking forward to hearing how yours went!

All right - if you have a similar setup to mine, which is a pair of C (or "ear" shaped arms/hinges bolting to the trunk lid with 2 bolts per side, and a pair of torsion rods spanning between each hinge to provide lift pressure against the rear of each hinge, then here is a process I believe we can go through to fix our situation. I'll test it and post again, just wanted to pass along what I have come up with.

1. since your lid was previously aligned correctly - and then was closed on a full trunk, tweaking it a bit, you have a situation where any adjustment of the stoppers on the trunk, or any adjustment of the bolts are *not* going to give you correct results IMO because they did not get moved. Your trunk, as mine, is aligned correctly on the "hinge" end of the trunk, or the rear of the trunk.

2. The torsion bars are twisted to provide spring tension against the rear of the big C shaped arms/hinges to give you a little trunk lift, and enough springiness to keep that trunk open when you lift it all the way up. Those tension bars are snapped into place in the top center of your trunk, and rotate slightly within a plastic "snap in" holder that keeps them from flapping around. Thus, the tension bars are not the culprit either in this situation, so we can rule them out for now.

*****I just re read your post - for yours, you have hydraulics for lift. But, similarly, we can rule those out too! **********

3. The bolts holding your trunk on have likely not moved at all, and their movement would have resulted in a fore/aft shift in your lid, either towards the rear window or away from it. The problem is up and down, not fore and aft.

4. The trunk lid is fine, flat and not bent.

Up to this point, all of our descriptions match pretty closely - although my misalignment occurred before I got it so I can only guess as to how it happened, although it is very common for things to get under the trunk arms and when you close it you are generating a huge amount of torque. So, I'm betting mine got tweaked the same way. It's just too easy to get stuff under those trunk arms.

5. What is left is the actual shape of the C- shaped hinges/arms. When something got under there and the trunk lid was pushed closed, even if it was not very hard, you're generating a lot of leverage at that point, enough to tweak a hinge made of mandrel - bent, light tube steel. This would then "unbend" the C shape slightly.

So at this point, knowing that if we push down on the "high spot" of the closed deck lid with our hands and the trunk settles back down into the weatherstripping, I am suspecting that we simply have a tweaked trunk arm/hinge - specifically,, one that became "opened up", increasing the length between end points - and raising our trunk lids.

Option 1:... to check: take both hinges out after marking 'em with a sharpie to keep track of orientation and the the L & R sides. Put both together and look for the tweak. Re-bend the tweaked one back down into its rightful shape with a rubber hammer or a gorilla and reassemble. Done.

Option 2:... (The one I am going to do first) : Leave it assembled and just measure between points on the hinge , looking for an "opened up" measurement. If it's there, use a couple of hooks and a long piece of threaded rod to make a tightening clamp, and attach to both apexes of the C- shaped hinge (where it would logically be able to re-bend the opened - up spot.) gently tighten the bolt on the end of the threaded rod until arm bends back together slightly, close to test, repeat until aligned correctly.

Lastly - we could always just pick up a junkyard hinge/arm and bolt it in, provided that it's the same color and that the junkyard vehicle's lid is nice and level. But I know we can re-bend these arms with no sweat.

I will build a little threaded rod & clamps to scrunch it slightly and observe the alignment afterwards. I'll share my results.

TLR - Duane never got a chance to look into my trunk, or provide me with any theories. We ended up going to the Jesup, IA snowmobile drags today. So this is my own theory and I hope it is correct. I can not find any validation of this online - but thinking through all of this, and staring into my trunk many times brought me to this point.
It makes sense to me with the leverage provided against that C shaped hinge - opening up the C shape and raising the lid a bit. To visualize it, close your trunk halfway and imagine pushing inwards on your trunk lid on one side only - towards the car at an angle the same as the angle of the opened trunk - and if you pressed hard enough (with a gorilla at your back) you would then begin to close the gap of that C shaped hinge, and when it was closed, the lid should be leveled.

Hope it was not too terribly TL/DR. Thanks for reading.

Scoop

Thanks for all the tips! I essentially took all the carpeting out and took it to the manager I've known for a while now at Lexus of oakville.

He literally put one hand on the top of the lifted side and one on the bottom and pushed down as hard as it could. All I hear was a click and now everything is back to normal and perfectly aligned. I have no clue what he did but it worked.

Awesome!!! I think that supports my theory!! He must have gorilla blood! lol

very cool of him to do that for you and I am glad that worked!

Take that extra $250 and go buy a bunch of pizzas and a trunk organizer lol

It would give long before the hinges would move.