How To Fix Window Guide Rattle 1997-2004 Ford F150

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In this video, we're going to be working with our 1998 Ford F150. Now it's very common in these trucks for you to get a really annoying rattling or banging sound inside of your front doors. The solution for this is usually the steel on the door blowing out and allowing the rear window guide to move around. Fortunately, there's an easy repair for this that we're going to show you now, and you don't even need to weld in order to pull it off. If you like this video, please click subscribe, we have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles, and if ever need parts for your truck you can follow the link down in description over to 1AAuto.com. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.

Now it's very common on these F150s for the door to break right where the window track or window guide, which is what allows the window to stay in place as it drops into the door. That bolt tears through the inner skin of the door, and can create that kind of tapping or rattling sound when you drive your truck, as well as not having your window be secure in there. Fortunately this is such a common issue, there's a very easy repair for it.

We're going to remove this 11-millimeter bolt and get the old chunk of sheet metal off of there. You can see here that this piece of sheet metal is right where that hole is, and if you had a welder you could just tack that in there, but fortunately we have an easy solution even if you don't weld.

Now I have this old piece of sheet metal lying around from another project. It's not incredibly thick, which is actually going to make it easy to work with, and since we're not covering a very big hole here, it doesn't have to be super sturdy. I'm just going to take, with a Sharpie, you could measure this out. I'm going to just take a marker here and just measure out approximately size and shape here, and I'm sure I'm going to have to trim this a little, but that's okay. This is just an average pair of tin snips or metal shears. You could use some cutting tools if you have them, like a cutoff wheel or a grinder, but again, it's very thin stuff and very easy to work with. So I'll cut my shape out. Actually I didn't do too badly there. We'll take our marker, I'll set this corner in, and I want to round this one off a little, and round this one off a little. We'll need to go to there with that. We'll just keep trimming until it fits inside of that hole.

We're going to put some grease on the old broken piece of metal. You want to go pretty thick here. Now I'm going to hold it roughly where it was on the door. Put our panel in and press them together. That was actually the grease on my finger, made that center mark. So now I know right where we want to drill our hole.

Now we'll drill that hole out. I used a 5/16" drill bit, which is actually a little bit oversized but that's fine, we have that huge washer on there from the factory, so let's go make sure this lines up.

That's right in the middle of our blowout there, and our bolt hole lines up perfect. Now we'll hold it in place, install our bolt, and tighten it down to hold our sheet metal in place. There is some small adjustment here if you want. Really just want to keep that window guide in the back pretty straight, so tweak it as necessary. Right about there looks good. Bring that down, and tighten it up with an 11-millimeter socket. You don't want to go too tight just yet because we don't want to suck in that sheet metal and create gaps.

Now yes, you could just leave it tight like this and everything would probably be fine, but we already had one failure so we're going to go ahead and overdo it a little bit. We're going to drill out the corner, we're going to rivet it into place, and this is all going to depend on exactly what rivets you use.

We'll now install a rivet. Nice and secure. So now we'll go ahead and just throw them in a few more places. Depending on how bad yours blew out, you may want to add more or less, and the locations are going to vary as well, but I'm going to go ahead and probably throw five or six in here just to make sure everything stays put. Now that everything's in place, we'll finish tightening down our 11-millimeter, and now our window guide is right where we want it. Now this metal already has a rust coating on it that we used. If yours doesn't, you'll want to just put any kind of paint on there. This is inside the door so it doesn't matter, but it is going to help prevent that from rusting out.

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