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Mostly successful... I got the old window out and the new one in. The trick to that seems to be unscrewing the front and rear guides -- the front one will drop out but you can retrieve it later with the glass out -- and lifting the top roller out of the rear guide, then angling the rear guide forward while gently working the front guide and top rear guide up/forward out of the door frame. It's an extremely tight fit, with the bottom guide bracket hardware getting pinched by the outer door frame.
As for locating all the window guide screws, the two lower ones up front are directly behind and just below and rearward of the speaker enclosure. You have to remove the speaker enclosure temporarily to get to the middle one. As it turns out, that's the only disassembly of stuff necessary other than the two vertical guides. The bottom rear screw is accessible through a little hole.
Now, as for the "mostly" part... For some reason, the window stops about 1" from the bottom and several inches from the top. It doesn't seem to be hitting on anything, so I'm stumped at the moment. Has anyone had that happen? I'm guessing I've got one of the multitude of overlapping weatherstripping and guide pieces interfering with it.
Edit: "Mostly" problem mostly solved! The short vertical front edge of the big inner weatherstrip (wraps around the front, top, and rear of the glass) wasn't snapped into the front window guide. The thing is a jigsaw puzzle to put back together... The window was getting pinched under the weatherstrip instead of traveling over it. Once I loosened the guide, it was able to snap in and the window goes up all the way now. It still stops 1" from the bottom, I guess for an unrelated reason. I'll keep looking for the cause of that, but it's a pretty minor issue since it's only the back edge of the glass that sticks up slightly.
Also, regarding the window guide screws that are so tight and frequently stripped. I think they're actually pretty solid if you use the right phillips bit. Judging from the condition of my previously removed screws, I imagine people are using the "big" bit which is actually the medium one. I think they're sized as #0-1-2? The biggest of the three isn't a very common size, but it fits those screws perfectly and makes them easy to work with. If you need to mess with the window guides, do yourself a favor and have that size phillips on hand!
I got the B-pillar chrome trim piece painted along with self-etching primer. It looks fantastic. Hopefully, it proves durable. I'll be doing the same on the passenger side when I work on that belt line moulding.
I figured out the cause of the window not going down that last inch, but the solution is escaping me. At the bottom of the actuator rail is a white plastic bump stop that it's hitting. The problem is, I see no adjustability (i.e., nothing that I could have altered during the glass swap) and the glass' metal guide seems like it can only mount onto the regulator arm in one way.
The actuator's white plastic piece it mounts onto is sort of a rocking chair shape that rotates as it goes up or down, and the metal arm that extends forward from it sits under the guide, presumably for better lifting force. Unless there's some way to raise the actuator's mechanism relative to the metal guide, I'm not sure what else to try. I've felt around from the access panel and through the speaker opening for any obstructions and haven't felt any. I've tried assisting the window at the bottom in case the weatherstripping is pinching it but it hits solid on the bump stop.
Does this look right? I didn't look at it before removal, but I could pop the pass. panel off to compare.
Edit: Post #11 in the window regulator replacement thread looks the same as mine:
Also, I pried off the bump stop at the bottom of the regulator rail and that allowed the window to go down about half the remaining distance, so I know it's not my imagination that it's hitting the bump stop. (I had estimated it by where the bump stop lines up on the outside of the panel.) It's like the whole rail/stop assembly needs to be slid down, but it doesn't appear to have any adjustability.
My mechanic took a look at it and couldn't see anything wrong with the setup. His best guess is that maybe the "new" window is just that much taller. Anyone know if the door glass changed over the years? Seems unlikely that everything else about it would be identical except for the height.
So, unless someone has suggestions for some forehead-slapping thing I overlooked, I guess I'll just have to live with it not going down that last inch. The car is too wide for me to comfortably rest my arm on the window sill, anyway. I always use the door and console arm rests, if anything. Now that I think about it, it's just begging for some Porsche-style bodywork... Instead of going with a wide body kit, leave the wheel arches as-is and bring in the wasted width of the doors!
p.s. I loosened the three bolts for the actuator rail that the glass' guide clips to, but as I figured, there's no adjustability to the mounting positions.
Mystery solved! I pulled the driver's door glass out of a '95 and lined it up with the old one from my '94. To my surprise, the '95 glass is 1-2" taller than the '94 glass, which explains why it hits the bump stop before going down all the way.
'95 glass in back, '94 glass in front. They're lined up almost vertically so very little error is introduced from the lean.
I'm guessing that means '95 switched to a taller window and that the same holds true for '96-00, but it could be that just '94 is an oddity. At any rate, this is the first I've seen of the door glass not being identical for all '92-00, other than the two factory tint (smoked vs amber?) variations. So, be aware of the potential '94-95 split if ordering something new.
The next aspect I'm curious to look into, although it won't be particularly easy, is whether the change to the '95 window regulator includes a lower bump stop to account for the taller glass, and whether there are any other changes that would keep it from being swappable into the '94.
06-05-15, 04:26 PM
