DIY – Electric Rear Window Motors
Mazda 323fNotesI’m writing this guide for anyone else who wants there rear windows to be motorized. I bought a set of front motors and rails off ebay from a scrap car for £20. The proceedure for putting the front motors in the back doors is shown below. If you get the correct motors for the rear doors then it will be much easier. I had to do some modification to get the fronts to fit the rears as shown.
Here is what I got from Ebay:
The window sits in a platform that runs up the rail, the platform is connected to cables which are connected via pulleys to the motor. When the motor turns the cables retract in one direction either pulling the platform up or down.
These are the tools you’ll be needing, not shown is hacksaw and mole grips.
Remove the door card, a screw in the door handle lever and clip in the window winder are all that are removed.
Under the door card, remove the following bolts. I recommend using a marker pen to draw around the bolts so that you can correctly align them when you put it back together! I just used the indentation in the paint.
There will be two blocks on the top of the sill these are to stop the window popping out too far, remove these.
Wind the window down so you can get to the bolt and nut that hold the window in place. You don’t have to remove the nut, just losen it. You need to fully remove the bolt!
Wind the window down further to loosen the other nut. (2 nuts and one bolt hold the window to the platform)
Lift the window out the door, it may catch on the rubber seals.
The window comes out like this. A very green tint!
Locate these nuts;
These three nuts hold the main rail in place. Remove these, they may be locktighted so hold the thread with mole grips.
Through the polythene seal remove the nuts holding the window winder mechanism.
The main guide should come out fairly easily, the hand winder part will squeeze past the inside guide just about.
Now the fun begins! The hand mechanism comes out like this.
Unhook the cable with a thin screwdriver, remove the nylon holder from the frame.
At the other end the cable guide has a clip, depress it and slide the guide out.
Remove the cables from the centre hold.
This is the motor assembly from ebay I got. A bit rusty! What we need to remove is the cables and motor portion only.
The difference between the front door rails and rear door rails is tiny, the rear is about 10mm shorter and has less of a curve. The cables are slightly different length which I have found a way to accommodate. I’m not sure if you can use the original ‘hand’ cables with the motor, but its something you can look at, I decided to move the cable sheath further away from the pulley, increasing the cable length! If you don’t do this, the cable will be slack and the window will move about 10mm if you moved it by hand.
Use the same technique to remove the cables from the scrap runners and put the motor and your door window rail together. First of all we need to do now is hook the cables up!
This is the first problem I found. This cable guide is the wrong way around. The reason is the rear doors and front doors mount the motors in different positions to the rails. We need to take the cable guide of the hand rail cable. We do this by cutting a groove in the cable guide and extracting the cable.
Hold the guide in the mole grips – you can use a vice. Cut two lines either side like this;
Remove the cable. Do the same for the guide on the old set of cables. Then swap them over! Put the cables into the cable guide.
Now the cable guide will fit on the correct side of the frame!
On the other end of the runner, I’ve marked a section where I want the cable to start – where it comes from the grey cable tube. I’m going to cut a tab out so that the white nylon clip will fit in it.
For reference this is what the motor assembly ‘should’ look like. While I was doing this, the cables got snagged up and I had to wind them up again. Just try to make sure the cables are tight before you put the reel back in, and pull the blue bits apart so that the cable is compressed. A bit of grease in there wouldn’t hurt either.
Hopefully it will look like this now!
Look at this picture, everything is set up just right. The springs on the motor are taught – like they were on the original runner, this means no play in the window! The orientation should be like this too, the motor is lying the wrong way up in the picture however. Now is a perfect time to test everything out – this way you know the cables arent snagged, and the motor will work in the door.
I put the runner and motor back in the door. Now the problem I found was positioning the motor, there is no perfect place for it to fit. Since this was made for the front doors there is less space and almost no mechanical fit. Fear not, I found an ideal spot. Basically the motor fits (just right) between the rail and inner door skin, if you can manage to hold the motor in that position while fitting the runner, you can tighten the nuts up and the motor will be held in that position. Check the cables aren’t too much of a right angle and it should be fine. Just try and get it how it looks in these pictures and it should be fine!
Test the motor moves the runner to the top and to the bottom before proceeding. If it gets caught you’ll have to find out why and fix it.
Move the window up half way ready for the glass to be put back in!
When putting the glass back in, once again look at the rubbers, if it isn’t going in, then its getting caught on something!
Fit the stop blocks back in, to stop the glass popping out too far!
One final check the windows go up and down to your satisfaction, then its your job to fit the switches and power cables and what not.
Took myself about one hour to do a door. As I said this was a modified job because the parts used were from the front doors. If you find some rear door rails I expect that they will fit without modification, all you’d need do is swap the rails over.
The result: Electric windows for the bargain price of £20!
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I will checking all cables.