Last night I received a Perrin antenna for my IX SSL, and like many posters before, the stud on the bottom was a bit too long, so the antenna did not screw all the way down and left a gap between its base and the mounting point on the car. Below are pictures of this gap on other cars, and you can also do a search for "Perrin" and "gap."

Anyway, I removed the Perrin label and shortened the stud with a Dremel tool, per many prior posts. I would not waste anyone's time mentioning any of this except I thought I might mention a couple of things that I did not see in any prior posts, which might help some diligent searcher in the future who might stumble over this thread.

First, it is not necessary to grind down the stub while it is still mounted in the Perrin antenna. If you look carefully, you will see that the stud has a hole in the top, which is sized for a small (one or two mm?) Allen wrench. I used such a wrench to unscrew the stud, which came right out.

Next, I used a caliper to measure the stud (about 22 mm) and decided to shorten it down to about 19.5 mm (removing slightly more than the size of the gap, at least on my car). (I could have just gone to the hardware store at this point and tried to find a shorter stud (usually used as a set screw), but it was late and this was faster for me.)

I found a metric nut that fit the stud, then clamped the nut in a vise and screwed the stud into the vise vertically, with the side opposite the Allen hole facing up. I wanted to keep the Allen end intact for obvious reasons.

I pressed a paper towel against the bottom of the stud to keep it from rotating, then used the Dremel on high speed carefully to grind it to length. I made sure the thread sustained no damage and I cleaned up the fresh edges of the stud.

I ran the nut up and down the end of the threads to clean them up, reinstalled the stud in the antenna using my Allen wrench, and reinstalled the antenna on the car. The gap was gone. The reception seems fine.

I apologize, but I did not take pictures of the process itself.

 

umm... still looks like a gap to me.

 

thats a big gap.. i never knew this prob existed.. mine fits perfect..