Hey guys chris fix here and today, i'm going to show you how to replace a window regulator motor in your vehicle. Now, in this case, we'll be doing it on my hummer and as you can see, the window is stuck halfway down. I should have known better that window regulator motor was making a groaning noise out of nowhere, and i still use the window over the period of a month and then, finally, in the worst possible day when it's raining, it finally quit and gave out and the window Was stuck halfway open, but that's okay, because that gives me the opportunity to show you guys how to replace a window regulator motor and you might be saying to yourself. Well chris, it's going to be on a hummer.

Well, the good thing is replacing a window regulator. Motor is basically the same in any vehicle. The major difference is going to be how to remove the interior door panel. Now, every manufacturer, every single make and model has a different method of securing the door panel to the door.

Some use screws some use little plastic clips that you need to pop out whatever it is for your vehicle. As long as you can figure out how to remove your door panel. That way, we can access the window regulator, motor, which is usually right around here then you'll be able to follow along and replace your bad window regulator, motor and save yourself, a ton of money. Now real, quick.

Here's how you can tell your window motor is going bad. If, when you roll your window up and down, it makes a grinding noise or a loud, whining noise, or maybe your window rolls up and down slowly or it seems weak and gets stuck, or maybe it won't roll up or down at all. If you encounter any of those symptoms, you probably need a new window motor, but with that said, if your window isn't going up or down don't jump to conclusions, it's not necessarily a bad window motor. There could be other things causing it to not work and i'm gon na real quickly show you how to check for those, because i hate throwing parts of the car, and i rather diagnose the problem than just take some guesses and the first and probably easiest thing To check is your power window fuse, go check out your owner's manual? Look for a page like this, where all the fuses are listed and look for the power window fuse.

You can see right there. Our fuse is located in the top left corner and then, if we go down to the fuse box, remove the fuse box door pop off the fuse box cover and right here is the fuse for the window motor that we need to check and taking a look At our fuse, you can see the middle part. There is not burnt out, it's one complete connection, so our fuse is perfectly fine and to give you an idea of what a bad fuse looks like. I have this fuse right here, which i'm gon na pop.

So keep an eye on it and that's what a popped fuse looks like if the motor is overworked like if your window gets stuck or if there's corrosion from water getting in there. The fuse is gon na get too much current going through and it'll pop. Just like that to protect the circuit, so now, let's reinstall our good fuse, making sure it's pushed in all the way, reinstall the cover for the fuses and reinstall the fuse box door good. So in this case our fuse was fine.

But let's just say you pull the fuse and you see it's blown. What do you do next? Well, i'd replace it with the same exact size fuse, don't go any larger. So if you have a 5 amp fuse use, another 5 amp fuse. That way, you don't damage anything and go test out.

The windows roll your window down roll it up, see if that fuse blows right away or if the windows work. If the fuse blows right away, there's a good chance, your window regulator motor is bad or you have a bad connection in the switch or even a bad connection at the window motor, but that at least tells you something that's helpful. If it doesn't blow again, it could have just been the motor is starting to go bad and there's a high load on it. So it blew to protect the circuit and just use it until it blows again and see how long that takes.

It might not blow again or it could blow again in a week a month who knows, but that's just something to go off of so if your fuse blows, you know exactly what you need to do now in this case it didn't blow so the next step. I would do is i would test the actual window button now. If the window switch itself is blown out and not working when you press up or down it's not going to work, so that could be your problem and the easiest way to test that is to grab the window switch from the passenger side. Most of the time.

They're identical they're, the same exact switch, so you could replace them. We know the passenger side, one works perfectly. Fine. The window rolls up and down.

So let's carefully pop the window switch out good, then we can remove the switch and inspect the connections. You want to make sure you don't see any burn marks on the prongs, and this looks good and check on the harness side as well, and this also looks good. So now we can test out the passenger side switch. So, let's plug it in and let's give it a try.

Okay, so i'm pressing the switch and the window isn't moving at all. So now we know for sure it's not our switch. That is the problem because we knew this switch worked on the passenger side. So our fuse is fine.

The window switch is fine. The next common problem is where the wires go from the door into the car. There's this little piece of plastic here now: the hummer is a bad example, because this piece of plastic, where the wires go through, is solid. It isn't rubber.

It doesn't bend the door actually slides along that plastic. So there's no chance that the wires in here can get pinched, but this isn't how it is in most cars. So real, quick. Let's go check out the jag, which has the more typical rubber wire protector inside the door jamb, which you could see right there and sometimes what happens here.

The wires in this loom get pinched because when the door opens and closes, those wires are constantly moving and over time. There's some wear and tear in here the wire could get damaged, and then you lose connection to your power windows. Now, a real, quick and easy way to test for a broken or damaged wire in this wire loom is to press down on the window, switch with the bad window and move that wire loom around with your hand. If it makes a connection, your window will start to roll down like that and if you move it, some more it'll stop and if you get it back into the same spot, it'll roll down some more so that'll give you a good idea.

There is a break in there and then you'll have to take the door off and repair that break. Usually you could splice in wire and that's just a really quick and easy way to test for that. It's not perfect. Sometimes the wires are so broken and disconnected.

You won't make that connection and you'll just have to test for 12 volts at the actual window regulator motor in the door. But in this case you just move it around and it makes the connection and you can see the window will go up and down no problem. And finally, the last common reason: your window won't roll up or down is because the entire window regulator has failed. That's this right here, this mounts inside the door and then the glass mounts here and here and then when you roll your windows up, it goes up this guide when you roll it down.

It goes down this guide and this specific regulator is for a dodge. Viper. Very common problem on those cars - you can see right here: it uses a worm gear and that's how it moves the window up and down that goes into a plastic tube, and that goes to the motor. Now this plastic tube is what fails.

I don't know why they don't use metal, they don't make a new one with metal and, like i said, all the gen 3 to gen, 5. Vipers all have this failure point, and these are expensive. They're, 500. Each same thing with the regulator inside the hummer.

That is a 450 regulator, they're not cheap, which is why you want to diagnose the problem instead of installing a brand new regulator, we're installing the regulator motor, which is 50 bucks for the hummer, because a lot of these motors are interchangeable, for example, this one is For a 91 to 96 jeep cherokee i'd rather spend 50 bucks than 500. This is also a lot easier to replace. So let me show you how to do this and don't worry. I will show you guys in another video how to do an entire window.

Regulator replacement, but for this video we're focusing on saving a ton of money and just installing a window regulator motor and to do that here are all the tools and products you're going to need, and i like to keep things nice and simple. We have a drill and drill bits to drill out the three rivets holding the old motor to the regulator, otherwise we're using common hand tools. We have a bungee cord to hold the door open, so it doesn't swing in the wind. We have dry lubricant i'll, show you where to use that we have a tray to keep all the fasteners for the interior panel.

That way we don't lose any, and then we can't put it back together properly and finally, we have our window regulator motor. It is that simple i'll, be sure to include a link to all these tools and products in the description, so you could easily find them now, let's get started so the first thing we need to do is to prevent the door from closing on us as we Work on it, so i like to use a bungee cord to hold the door open so with the door secured. Now we can begin by removing the door panel, and this is where it's gon na be a little bit different for each vehicle out there. With this panel, there are five screws on this side that hold the panel in so remove all five of them and keep these in your tray.

So you don't lose them and then there's two more screws in the armrest that need to be loosened. But these don't come out all the way they stay in the door handle so with all the screws removed on this side, including the handle. Now we can remove the screws on this side of the panel and we'll start with the top corner screw here, then we can unscrew the door, strap bolt and remove the door strap and then let's remove the bottom right corner screw. And finally, there are six screws holding the handle and door switches in so remove the two door switch bezel screws.

Then we can remove the four screws that hold the handle in and now we can disconnect the switches and then slide the door handle through the door panel. So we can remove the panel now. All that's holding in the panel is some velcro at the top, so it should lift right out like that beautiful so now most cars will have something called a moisture barrier. That's this piece of plastic! It prevents the moisture from the outside getting into the interior of the car, so we don't want to rip this.

So removing it's pretty simple, but i have a couple quick tips to make sure you don't rip it so first you're going to just try to remove it. Just like you would anything else. You can see all this butyl rubber tape that is coming off. That is fine.

Try to keep that in place because that's going to help you seal it back up and that's actually coming off really easy, but sometimes it doesn't come off that easily. So let's pretend this is really stuck on there and it's ripping the plastic as we try to peel it off. So what you're going to do is you're, going to grab a straight edge razor blade like that and you're going to cut that butyl rubber. As you peel this off, just like that, so you're not damaging the plastic and, at the same time that butyl rubber is staying in place.

That way, you could push this plastic back on when you're done so carefully, remove the moisture barrier without ripping it, and this blade is working great to help do that beautiful. So we can let the moisture barrier just hang there. We don't need to remove it all. The way because we have the access we need to our window regulator, motor, which is right here, also another benefit of just letting it hang there is.

It won't touch the ground. You don't want to get any of this butyl rubber dirty, because if it gets dirty, it doesn't adhere properly. When we try to put the moisture barrier back and then it'll just fall down when we try to reinstall the door panel, so we're good to go next. Let's remove the window motor, so if we take a look at our brand new window regulator motor you can see.

There's three spots on here that we're gon na have to drill out, and those are the three rivets now we could get to those two. But we can't get to that one, so we're gon na have to remove this metal support beam. So, let's clip the zip tie, holding the wiring harness in then remove this t27 bolt that holds in the regulator. And finally, we can remove the two phillips head bolts on either side and actually with this one loose.

We could just leave this hanging here since it's out of the way. So now we have access to all three rivets which we could drill out so grab your drill bits and you want to get a correct size drill bit i'll show you how to tell, which is the correct size. So when picking out a drill bit to drill out your rivet, you want to make sure you find a drill bit that is bigger than the inside diameter of your rivet. This drill bit is way too small and fits on the inside here.

So this isn't going to do anything. This will just drill through the rivet. It's not going to drill the rivet out. Instead, a drill bit this size is perfect.

The diameter is bigger than the inside diameter of that rivet and you can see when it drills it out. It's going to drill a little bit on that shoulder that way. It drills the rivet out and breaks it off, so we can pop it out so drill into the rivet deep enough. So the shoulder breaks like that and you can see the shoulder on the drill bit and then follow the same process for the other two rivets drill it out into the head of the rivet brakes good and to give you an idea what we're doing here's the Rivet and you can see it pops out because the head isn't holding it in anymore.

So now we have one last rivet to drill out and perfect. Now the motor is free, so let's pull it out and real quick. I want to try something if i press the window switch now, nothing happens, but let's give it a few whacks with the back of the screwdriver and there you go, the motor is barely working, but it is moving now and that's why sometimes, when you slam your Door or you hit the door panel, the window motor starts to work for a little bit and then dies again like that. So, no matter what this definitely has to be replaced so disconnect the wiring harness from the motor, and now the motor is free to be removed.

So out with the old and in with the new now i always like to compare parts to make sure they look identical and right away. I could see a difference. This has a metal plate, that's still riveted to the back of our motor, and this one does not. So we need to take this metal plate off and transfer it to here.

So we have to finish drilling out this rivet. Another thing i want to check are these sprockets. I want to make sure both of these sprockets are identical and if you take a look at that, they are the same size have the same pitch. All of that make sure they're in the same orientation good and then.

Finally, we want to make sure that both of the connectors are identical and our old one's actually in good shape, always check for corrosion, because sometimes water gets in. There causes corrosion and causes it to short out, but both of these look good. Otherwise. So let's transfer this plate over to this new motor, so drill out this last rivet good and then let's take our metal plate and transfer it to the new motor.

Like so and now, instead of using rivets here, what we're going to do to make it simple we're going to use nuts and bolts, so our bolt will fit right through here, and this is just an extra bolt i had laying around then. Let's add a little bit of medium strength, thread locker, so the vibrations don't loosen up the nut and bolt now we could hand tighten that nut on all the way and then we could snug it up using our wrenches good. So now we put our plate on there there's one more thing we need to do, and that is get a little bit of silicone paste and pack it into where the wires connect and what this will do. This will prevent any moisture from getting in here and causing corrosion, so we're corrosion free.

We have our plate on here our gears in the right spot. Let's install this so first, let's connect the wiring harness to the motor. Then we need to get this motor in place on the window regulator. Next, let's get the three bolts in there and i'm just gon na tighten down one nut to this top bolt right here and that'll secure the motor to the worm gear.

So it doesn't move as we test it out, and this will also let us test out how far this bolt sticks out, because the glass might hit it right here, and this is important to do because originally they used a rivet and the rivet didn't stick out. Very far, the rivets stuck out just a little bit like that. Meanwhile, this bolt sticks out pretty far. I have a feeling this bolt is going to cause a clearance issue with the glass coming down.

So let's try it out all right moment of truth. The window goes all the way up, which is good, but let's see if we hit that bolt going down and yep, i had a feeling we're gon na have this problem you can see the window frame is hitting the bolt, but i have an idea on how To solve this, so let's unscrew the bolt all the way and remove it and we're gon na flip the bolt around like this. So the threaded part sticks out the other way and there's no clearance issues and just to be sure, there's enough clearance. I'm going to remove this washer, which does push the bolt head out just a little bit, even if it's just an extra millimeter, so snip both sides of the washer using a side cutters and that breaks the washer right off.

Now we need to remove the motor and install all three bolts facing the opposite way, and hopefully this will solve the clearance problem. So now, let's get that motor back in place on the regulator and push the bolts all the way through and while one clearance issue might have been resolved, we have another one right here. This bolt sticking way too far out. So let's mark this bolt where it needs to be cut, remove the bolt - and you can see right there is where we need to cut.

So let's get this bolt into a vise with our green cutting mark near the edge and make sure you tighten the vise down on the threads that we're not going to use that way. We don't damage the threads that we will be using to tighten that nut and bolt so now line up the saw and saw the bolt until it's cut all the way through. You could use power tools here, but i like to show you guys. This could get done, which is a plain old hand, saw okay, so we're coming to an end here and make sure you saw all the way through and just like that.

We have our shortened bolt so now, let's get this in place and i'm using a magnet to hold the bolt in since it's so small and hard to get in there and once that's in let's get some medium strength, redlocker on all three of these bolts. So the vibrations don't loosen them up, then we need to get a nut onto each of the three bolts and snug them down to sandwich that motor to the regulator. So these two at the top are easy to get to and tighten up, but for the bottom one i'm using a crow's foot wrench just because it's so tight to get back there and that'll hold the head of the bolt as we tighten down this last nut. Good so now let's go test the window out.

Okay, so let's see what we got here perfect, what we did here worked and check this out. We have the clearance we need that way. Our window isn't hitting the bolt anymore. Now, let's wrap up this job and finish putting the door back together, starting with tightening down the support, beam and don't forget that middle support bolt holding the regulator and motor in place.

Then we need to add a zip tie up here to hold that harness in so cinch that down and then use the side cutters to clip the end of the zip tie for a nice clean, install. Next, let's get the moisture barrier in place so get the door handle through the barrier, as well as the wiring harness for the window, switch and door locks, and then we can fit it to the top of the door where that black butyl rubber outline is, and Then firmly press against the moisture barrier along the whole entire edge to seal it to the door. Now, if, for whatever reason, your moisture barrier isn't sticking, maybe the butyl rubber got dirty. Maybe it's just old and it's not sticking.

You could always buy more butyl rubber. It's inexpensive i'll leave a link in the description and it's really simple. You cut a piece off like that and then all you do is stretch it out. So it's nice and thin and then you can place it wherever you need it and you're good to go.

Okay, so, finally, let's install our door panel onto the door, starting with passing the door handle through the panel and then the wires also need to go through next, let's screw in the five screws on the left side of the door panel to hold it in place. Then screw in the two screws under the armrest good, that's nice and tight. Now, let's connect the wires to the switches, get that window switch connected and the lock switch connected as well good, and now, let's get the panel lined up onto the door and tighten down bolt screws to hold it in then we could tighten down the four screws On the door handle and do that in a crisscross pattern so that the handle seats evenly good next, let's get the door limiting, strap bolted in and snug that up, perfect and now all that's left is the bottom right hand, corner screw and the top right hand Corner screw good, so with our door panel reinstalled, we are good to go. The last thing we need to do is test the window make sure it's not binding up, make sure it works perfectly.

So let's try her out all right. We're going to send the window down, oh man, look at how fast and quiet that is and send it back up, and that is beautiful. So that is a job well done now, just in case you do that, and your window is binding up. Maybe it gets caught over here and starts slowing down.

You can hear the motor struggling on a brand new motor now in that situation. What i'd use is some dry lubricant. You can use silicone, but silicone is going to attract dirt and dust and hold it into that track and over time it's just going to wear out dry lubricant is going to go in wet, but then it will evaporate and leave behind the graphite which won't attract Dirt or dust and it'll keep it lubricated, i'm not going to lubricate this because i don't need to. If you don't need to don't touch it, but what you would do is you just go in the track? You'd squirt some down in there and then you'd move the window up and down do the same thing on the other side and see if it still binds up.

So that is everything you need to know on how to replace a window regulator motor and it is starting to pour perfect timing, our windows rolled up and we are good to go. We saved ourselves a ton of money 450 just by replacing the motor and not the entire regulator, because that's all we needed the window works fine, and i hope this video was helpful if it was remember to give it a thumbs up, if you're not a subscriber. Consider hitting that subscribe button, and, as always, all the tools and products are linked in the description of the video.