|
This is the front left (driver's side) door. When the regulator failed, the window fell into the door. I had to remove the interior panel (see notes at the end of this page) and carefully peel away the plastic rain guard to raise the window back up. If you ever have to open up a door like this, try to preserve the plastic as much as possible. I was generous with the tape because I knew from prior experience (with a different car!) that the tape gets soft and peels away if it sits in the warm sun too long. I also put tape on the bottom of the tape that went over the top of the door so the tape was sticking only to glass and not to the paint.
The tape was only a temporary fix (notice it is gone in this picture). This picture shows the first two approaches I used to keeping the window up. A phone cable was the only wire I had handy, so I looped it around a projection where two pieces of the regulator are bolted together and then fed the cable up through the hole at the top of the door. From there, I just kept looping it around the holes in the door, trying to make it snug. It held the window up pretty well. The second support was a 3-inch C-clamp (purchased at Lowe's) which was placed under the projection on the other side of the track of the regulator. I found that I could not adjust the clamp easily while it was in the door and that it had a tendency to slide off the regulator. You might have better or worse luck with a different C-clamp. I was hoping I could just tighten up the clamp and not have to bother with the phone cable, but it didn't work out that way.
This was the best solution I came up with while I worked on the regulator. I used 14-inch cable ties that I bought from Home Depot to keep the window up after I removed the regulator (notice that it is gone in this picture!). I fed the cable ties through the holes in the window glass where the window fastens to the regulator. I bought nylon cord in case the cable ties did not work out, but I never tried to use it because the cable ties worked just fine. You might be able to use 11-inch cable ties, but I think they will be harder to work with than the 14-inch cable ties. This is how I was planning to secure the window if I could not fix the window regulator. The regulator is held to the door by 1 nut and 2 bolts and to the window glass by three bolts. The nut and all the bolts have a 10mm head.
When I did remove the regulator from the door, this is what the motor looked like. This is bad. I think what happened is that one of the cables got wrapped around the shaft of the motor. When that happened, the ends of the cable pulled apart and one of them (the one that pulls up on the window) popped out of the regulator, causing it to fail (the window just dropped into the door with a thunk). The side of the motor you see here is the side you would see if you were in the car looking out through the door. The motor is not made to come apart. I started to take it apart, but stopped when it became clear I couldn't do that without breaking it. Be careful if you do decide to start taking it apart, because it looked like there was a spring coiled up pretty tightly inside the white plastic housing of the motor (on the other side that's not shown in any of the pictures). The motor is not designed to be fixed and my advice is not to try because (again) one, you can't get it apart without breaking it, and two, you'll probably hurt yourself in the process.
This is a good motor. Notice the compressed springs. They provide tension on the cables. If you are going to try to fix the regulator, you either need another person to hold the springs down while you try to put the ends of the cables back where they are supposed to be, or you need two vise grips to clamp onto the wire and hold it with the tension while you work on it. I tried using vise grips, which worked well enough, but I never was able to get enough wire out of the motor to have the ends meet in the little box on the plate of the regulator. That's why I think the motor chewed some of the cable up.
This is also very bad. The picture shows the track of the regulator. It is the side you would see if you were outside the car looking through the door into the car. The upper cable (in the picture) has pulled completely out of the housing at the bottom end of the track (on the left side of the picture). I managed to get it back into the housing, but it wasn't easy (it's not supposed to come out in the first place!). You can imagine how the pulley system works from this picture, though. I could not repair the regulator and had to replace it.
This is a big picture, but it shows the good regulator on top compared to the (pieces of the) broken regulator on the bottom. The motors have been flipped over relative to the track and plate of the regulator. The pieces of the plate of the bad regulator have also been flipped over. On the big plate, the tiny box near the middle of the picture is where the ends of the cables meet. The rest of the plastic parts on the pieces of the plate just position the plate on the track. The plastic bags hold the bolts, nuts, and screws from various stages (which are labeled on the bags) of the disassembly of the door.
This is the door after the window regulator was replaced. Hopefully, if you have to do something like this, this is what you will wind up with at the end! The first thing you have to do to take the door apart is remove the blue plastic piece that covers the speaker. I pried slowly at the corners nearest the door hinge with a big flat-head screwdriver and then worked my way to the center of the door. The piece is secured to the door by four fasteners (or five--one may have been missing from the door I worked on because it was broken off by an earlier repair attempt by someone else). The interior door panel is held in place by at least four screws and two fasteners. You have to peel back the carpet at the bottom corners of the doors and on the side of the door closest to the hinge to get at three of the screws. The other screw holds the armrest to the door and is under the plastic part that you should have removed first. On the door I worked on, one of the fasteners had been snapped off from an earlier repair attempt. I think it came from the upper left corner of the door in the picture. The other fastener is on the bottom, in the center between the two screws. Once the panel has been separated from the door, it should lift up off of the door--at least it did for me. You then have to carefully pull apart the connectors that attach the light and power window and lock controls to the wire harness in order to completely remove the door panel.
|
