I was poking around some boxes on a shelf and I found this gem from 1982. I was reading 4-Wheel & Off -Road magazine at the time and discovered they had a readers’ submissions section. My CJ5 at the time had a soft-top which was framed with metal rods. Jeep owners know all about these things.
Originally, apparently, where the rods joined at certain places there were plastic fittings so that the rods would not bang against each other. But, these fittings tended to fall off and get lost. When I got the Jeep the fittings were missing. The result was that at times the metal-on-metal banging was louder than a sword-fight scene in Robin Hood.
The article here outlines my solution to the problem. As it turned out, this process worked very nicely.