How to Fix a Rear Car Window

I had forgotten that the lass had managed to break the rear window of our Highlander this past Friday.  Now by break I don’t mean threw-a-rock-into-the-window-causing-daddy’s-head-to-explode kind of break.  I mean more in the hey-I’m-pushing-the-button-for-the-window-and-it-nothing-is-happening-BANG!

Ahem- sorry ’bout that.

We were in the Lowe’s parking lot picking up the various bits of my head… Alright, we were in the Lowe’s parking lot when the problem was discovered.  I took a couple of minutes to interrogate .. er .. ask her what had happened, but she didn’t know.  I then took the opportunity to remind her about ALL the times I had asked her not to play with the window and now she knows why.  You see?  Daddy was RIGHT!  I was about to call her a bad girl but decided the lesson had been sufficiently learned and didn’t need to be rubbed in.  (Peanut Gallery: She gave you the big, blue eye, pouty lip face, didn’t she? Me: Be quiet.)

It turns out that fixing the window is not too difficult.  The trick is taking the inner panel off.  The inner panel is held on with a bunch of retaining clips and 2 screws.  One screw is hidden behind the the door handle under a little tab, and the other is hidden under the door pull.  For the rest of the gory details, go here.

The window has a track on the bottom in which a pivot on the end of an arm slides as the arm moves up and down.  In my case, the pivot had jumped the track.  I had to remove the window switch from the door panel so that I could actuate the window arm to get it into a position where I could reengage the pivot with the track.  Having managed that I could now see how it had become disengaged in the first place.  Essentially, it took exquisite timing between window positioning and jostling the window.  Timing that is only attainable by the hands of a sub-5-year-old.

Having fixed it but not having closed everything up yet, I figured I’d bring the lass out to have a look at how the car window worked, but she had fallen asleep on the couch.  Oh well. I reassembled the door and thought that was the last of it.

Silly Daddy.

The next day (naturally, after it had started raining) the pivot jumped the track again.  I went through the whole process a second time and determined that the arm was slightly bent so that it “wanted” to pull out of the track.  I coaxed it back into position and closed it all up.  We’ll see how long before it happens again.