Driver's Side Power Window Stopped Working After Working on The Door

[UrQuattro]

Hey all

so, I have an 81 sc targa, and I've been working on replacing the door panels, speakers, trim pieces, etc.

I had been having that problem with not being able to fit the burgandy pieces I got from someone on here, and I had asked about how to cover the pieces I have in alcantara.

ANYWAY... so, I ended up successfully getting the burgundy door top to fit - kind of - I had to shave away slot of the extra padding on the inside face of it to bring the shape closer to the older pieces.

But before I fully attached the door top, I adjusted to driver's door quarter window slightly, because there has always been a gap between the top of the window and the targa top (more likely caused by a bad seal...)

the adjustment I made was that I pushed up and forward on the back of the quarter window and was able to get it to move up about 1/8" or so. It helped a bit, and it didn't seem to hurt the window at all.

Today, I worked on the other door and things went a lot better. The thing is that at the end of the day when I was closing up the car, I went to put the windows back up, and the passenger side went up just fine, but when I clicked up on the driver's side switch there was a small delay before it started going up, but it went all the way to the top. It wouldn't go back down again or respond at all anymore.

I checked the fuses in the front trunk, and everything seems fine.

I tried referrig to the bentley, but it is beyond useless as the colors of the wiring it refers to is completely differnt than what actually exists in my car.


One question I have is that, a long time ago, my car was broken into, and the stereo head unit was stolen. As you can imagine, they weren't particularly clean about it, and there are wires all over the place under the middle of the dashboard. I kind of feel like I might have caused the problem by messing around with those wires, because I'm about to install a head unit in the car finally, and I was trying to figure out what wires actually do what.

Anyway, are there any wires that run along under there that connect to the back of the center console or anything else that might interfere with the functioning of the driver's window?

Specifically something like blue and blue/red (blue/black is what it could be too, tough to tell for sure), as I saw those color wires plugged in to the driver's and passenger's side window switches.

I'm sorry again that this is so long. I'm just wracking my brain trying to figure out what i've done to make the window regulator stop working. It's ALWAYS worked great with no problems.


Thanks in advance everyone.

Michael

[UrQuattro]

Bump....

PLEASE.... if you have any ideas, I'd really appreciate the help.

I've been working on the car all day today, finishing up the other door and inspecting the random wires that are all over the place under the dash.

I triple-checked the wiring to all three of the window switches and they all match up to what they used to be.

I don't know if this is important, but the drivers side window has always had play in it laterally... You could have the door open and grab the top of the window and you'd easily be able to move it in toward the passenger side and out toward the drivers side. I think that is because the stop has never been adjusted properly and if I rolled the window up completely, it would not fit in to and under the side seal of the targa top.

Once someone pointed this out to me, I always made sure to only roll it up till the point where it would fit under the seal, but I'd have to put pressure on the window when closing, otherwise that play I talked about would prevent it from fitting.

I noticed today that I can now not only move the window laterally but also lift it up from the rear corner and pull it back from the rear corner. It just doesn't seem like it is truly attached in the same way the passenger window is.

Anyway, please help if you can. I can't think of what would cause the motor to suddenly burn out the way it SEEMS to have.

Thanks in advance everyone.

Michael

[Oh Haha]

Can you get any movement by wiggling the switch whilst pushing the button up/down? If so, then you need to check the wires at the point where they come into the door and up to the switch itself.

Do you get any noise at all when pushing the button? Take the door panel off and test the motor bypassing the switch. At least you'llknow if the motor is junk or not.

That's about all I can think of to help. I'll give you a bump to the top, though.

[wildcat077]

Michael,

Check your wire connector that goes from the switch to the motor itself.I had the same problem after i changed my door speakers... The motor stopped working.
Turns out the wire bundle that goes to the motor was pulled too tight from the motor
itself and the connection was intermittent.
Make sure your connector is plugged in correctly.
The best access to get to the connector is through the speaker hole in the front door.

I searched quite a few posts before i discovered my solution...Wayne has the right idea !

Cheers !
Phil

[UrQuattro]

Hey,

thank you for the response. I actually have the switch forthright drivers window pulled out of the door panel and have actually tried a couple different switches.

I even tried getting some movement by moving the window itself through the amount of play it has and there was no response.

Im gonna be spending tommorow disassembling the door and testing the motor. Maybe a lead came out or something. I just don't know.

I don't know why it would fail in the fully up mode. Grr

here's something interesting that I GUESS could be involved, but I removed the passenger floorboard and found a controller for a "The UnGo Box". It has a couple switches on it (this controller is something like a stack of about 10-15 credit cards in size). The switch on the left looks to be a power switch and the one on the right looks to be a toggle switch between an option I and an option II.

I traced the wires in to the luggage compartment, where I found what must be the main brain of the alarm. There appear to be two main connectors with at least a dozen wires each in them, and one of them is disconnected.

There is a very large amount of red wiring just laying around up in the corner of the luggage compartment above the smuggler box.

So I'm not looking forward to figuring out what wires under my dash belong to this damn thing and what doesn't. I want it OUT of my car.

Ugh...

Yup

Michael

[UrQuattro]

So today I got in to the deiver's door again, and you guys were right. It turned out that one of the leads from the window regulator motor came off.

I got it all fixed now, and actually made some other adjustments to the window stops. The window would always go too high if I just rolled it all the way up, and that would keep I from fitting in to the side seal on the targa top. But now I adjusted it down a little bit, and it's perfect now.

Anyway...

No more panicking here.

Thanks everyone for the help. I think i'm gonna make a new thread about the ungo box alarm system that I found.

Michael

[Oh Haha]

Glad to hear this!!