The trouble with old vehicles

A week or two ago my car (a '90 LeBaron) started having a problem with the driver-side power window. The motor would keep running even after the window was all the way up, and then the window would slip back down a fraction of an inch. It wasn't long before the window went Whoooosh! and just dropped down all the way for good.

Back in November I had a problem with the headlight covers not closing properly (see DIY repair on an old car, or a nut job). That problem and ultimate resolution turned out to be very relevant to this new issue with the window. Both involve very similar motors and the main gear driven by the motor went bad in the same way in each instance. The gear actually has inner and outer pieces and apparently after about 17 years of use the inner piece tends to disintegrate. When it does, even though the motor is still working fine the gear no longer turns properly because of the inner mechanism disintegrating into debris.

I could have ordered the window motor ($63.95) or just a gear kit ($16.65). However, due to my experience with the headlight cover motor I chose option #3—fix the gear myself using whatever useful materials I had on hand.

I probably should take a moment here to state that I'm most definitely not a mechanic and don't know the proper terminology for what I'm describing. I simply hope that it makes some kind of sense to those who do have trained mechanical knowledge and that the various pics I include will help to clarify the details (though unfortunately I didn't take all the pics I probably should have to provide proper visual aids).

Anyway, the headlight cover motor was much easier to access. The power window motor requires that the inner door panel be removed and that took quite some time to figure out. I believe (thinking back on it now) that it involved removing seven screws total (all but one of which were not immediately obvious), prying out the window switch panel, prying off the speaker cover to access a hidden screw, removing the door handle trim (via another hidden screw which you can only find by pulling on the handle), and popping out the courtesy light unit to access the last hidden screw. Then the entire inner door panel could be popped off starting at the bottom and lifting it up and over the door lock button to remove it.

I had to maneuver the window switch plate through the hole in the inner door panel to completely set the panel aside out of the way. The wires to the door speaker—not original—came off in the process, but they're designed to just slip on and off, so no damage was done. Then I had to loosen the foam soundproofing by removing two large-headed black plastic clips and peeling it mostly off to get it out of the way.

At this point I manually pushed the window up all the way and wedged a block of wood under it to hold it there, which was necessary to eventually allow the arm roller to be easily removed from the end of the slide bracket along the bottom of the window.



Finally a bracket (which served no function except to anchor the middle of the lower section of the inner door panel) had to be removed (only one screw) so as to allow the entire window motor, mounting bracket, and geared arm to be dropped down and out through the main access hole. Four hex head bolts, two top and two bottom, held the motor mounting bracket in place. You can see one of the top two bolts in the image showing the window wedged up (the two bolts are just under the block of wood). The two bottom bolts are on the underside of the door...



Here's the entire mechanism after it was removed, but viewing it as if you could see it from outside the car through a transparent door. This side shows the hex head bolts fastening the motor to the mounting bracket and the roller at the end of the arm which fits into the slide bracket at the bottom of the window...



With all of that done, I could then unscrew the motor from the mounting bracket and geared arm mechanism and look inside the gear head. The headlight cover motor did not seem to have much (if any) grease inside, but the window motor was loaded with grease which made it difficult at first glance to see what had happened. By poking about with a small screwdriver, though, I was able to discover and fish out the debris of what used to be an inner gear mechanism of some kind.

     

     

Having done that, I then pondered how to try to fix it. I probably should have tried to find nuts to use just like I did with the headlight cover motor gear (since that's still working), but instead I went with three pairs of ballbearings I found. I would have liked to use only three larger ballbearings, but I didn't have any so I used the smaller ones I had on hand, hence the need for three pairs of them. I just dropped them inside, trying to place them about where I wanted, then used the small screwdriver to position them more finely. The grease held them in place so that I could then fit the outer gear piece over the now improvised inner mechanism. The ballbearings replace whatever it was that had disintegrated, which I believe was the dark gray piece (or most of it) which you can see in the middle image of an available gear kit...



I then closed up the gear head and electrically reattached the motor to test it. Prior to the ballbearing fix, the motor gears would actually turn, but stutter. With the weight of a window on the arm mechanism, I knew there would be no way the motor could drive the window up and down properly. With the ballbearings in place, the gears seemed to turn solidly, no stutter effect. Then I attached the motor to the mounting bracket and geared arm mechanism and tested some more while still simply holding it all in my hands. The arm seemed to move smoothly and properly.

So at that point it was time to go for broke and insert the whole shebang back into the door, placing the arm roller back into the window's slide bracket, and securely fastening the unit in place via the four anchor bolts. Then came the last and most vital test—I tried raising and lowering the window and to my amazement it worked! And when the window went as high as it could go, the motor did not continue to try to raise it further. Wow. Apparently the only reason why the motor continued to run before after the window was raised was because the inner gear mechanism was crumbling to dust at that point and allowing the "slippage." Otherwise the motor would have stopped running once the window could go up no further.

All that was left was to reattach the foam soundproofing and inner door panel (easier said than done) but after some fumbling about I managed to get everything back together and I didn't even have any parts left over!

So now time will tell whether this repair is as successful as the headlight cover motor. I'm cautiously optimistic, but won't be surprised either if something goes wrong with it again at some point in the near future. Perhaps that's just my pessimistic nature showing itself.

Of course, there's a good reason for my pessimistic nature.... This morning I was out in my other vehicle, a '94 Town & Country minivan, when a nice lady pulled up beside me at a traffic light and informed me that my brake lights were not working. Great. I immediately returned home.

Early investigation did not yield any obvious positive results in identifying the problem, so that's when I returned to the LeBaron window motor problem since I had been working on that for a while, but had taken a break from it for a few days once I had it to the disassembled point where I could see what had happened. I wanted to consider my options before proceeding further.

I could have run my car even with the door torn apart since I had the window securely wedged up tight, but I didn't want to do that since it would have been extremely strange (no armrest to lean on and the large window switch plate dangling free). Then when I found out the van had no functioning brake lights with no obvious and easily fixable issue as the culprit, I figured it was time to go back to the car window problem and try to get that back to normal since I had a good idea of what I wanted to do about it. At least I'm back to one usable vehicle (for now).