How to Get Your Window Unstuck

Hey friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be working on a 2001 Ford Focus. I'm going to show you how to get a left front window unstuck. Let's do it.

Okay, so here we go. First step is to make sure we know what exactly is going on, right? So I'm going to turn the key to the on position. I'm going to give the left front window a little test here.

Definitely sounds like it's getting power down there. Seems as though something's binding up. So what we're going to do now, turn off the power to key right out so we don't kill the battery, and we're going to go ahead and remove this door panel and we'll see what's going on behind there.

So here we go. Let's start at the top. I'm just going to grab this, see if I can work it off. I might have to grab my trim tool. There we go. Okay. Get that off. I've just got these little tabby things. It's okay. Put it back in there for now. Okay. We have an electrical connector, as you can see. Let's see if we can figure out which way it comes off. Try going this way. Yeah. There we go. Just had to do it a little different. All I did was slide down in between the connector and the unit itself. That separated it enough to slide it right out.

So here we go. I got my handy dandy screwdriver. Just going to sneak it in here. We're going to shoot that across the garage. I'm going to take my torques bit 20. I'm going to take out this bolt right here, if I can get it out. There's our screw. Set this aside so we can't lose it.

So here we go. I've got my door trim tool. Just a piece of plastic, right? I'm just going to try and get it in here, get this to wiggle free. There it is. Okay. Behind here there's going to be some electrical connectors, so we're going to make sure we take those off and go back to my little screwdriver. We'll take a peek in here, see what we're dealing with. Sometimes they make things hard to see. That's okay. Here we go. We got this one right here. There's a little thumb connector or thumb depressor. Just going to push in on it. Slide this out. We always take a peek. Make sure we don't have any funny colors in our electrical connectors, right? We don't want any rust or anything like that. Debris, rainbow colors, all that's bad in electrical connectors.

We can move along, see what we're dealing with here. Got a little connector push button right there. See if I can do it with my thumb. I can't. It's okay. I'm just going to stick my small screwdriver in there once again. This tool is so handy. Now that I've got it wedged in, I'm just going to try to pull it off. Try again here. Oops. Still plugged in, that's for sure. I'm just going to try to wedge it in. Pull that off. We'll take a peek. Now we can move onto the next step.

So I'm going to use my trim tool. Once again, it's just plastic. I don't want to go ahead and scuff up any of this, right? It's not my door panel, and if it was, I especially wouldn't want to scuff it up. Let's remove that like that. Okay. It's going to be a screw right there, Phillips, one right in there. We're going to remove the two of these and then we'll move along. I'm going to grab my screwdriver here. Just take a peek. There's one, okay? The second one, that one's a little different. Bolthead. Why would they have it the same? That's okay. Let's grab our tool and we'll move along.

So I'm going to go ahead and use a quarter inch socket here with an extension. I'm going to get it right in there. Remove that bolt. There it is, my little magnetic screwdriver there. Love that thing. Cool. I'll just wiggle this around. Okay. So this is part of the door panel. Those bolts right there held the door panel on. Now that we've got these out, I'm just going to put my hand along the side. I can feel that there's a couple of bolts down along the bottom. There's a couple more bolts and then I'm sure along this side, a couple more. So I'm going to go ahead and use a T20 torques bit. I'm going to remove all these screws.

There's one. That's what it looks like. That's what the tool looks like. So let's go ahead and remove all those screws and we'll move along. There we are. Last one. Set it aside with all the rest of them. Let's try to give the door a little wiggle. It's feeling pretty good. Cool. I'm just going to go ahead up here, try to give it a little lift, see what's going on. There's our door handle. Okay. We've removed our door panel.

So here we go. Let's get this foam out of the way just so we can try to clear the way. Both clips on this side kind of go like this, okay, so when we lift, we're just going to lift it straight up. This one right here comes this way, so it's going to need to go that way. There is another one right here. This one comes in this direction. So at this point, now that I've got those out, I'm just going to try to rotate it, break it free. We'll set this aside.

Okay, so some of this already came off. All this right here is sticky goo, so if you have something like this, a little plastic scraper. You want to try to keep this stuff from getting on your arms or your clothes, especially. If you get it on your clothes, you're going to throw it in the washer and the dryer. It's going to make a mess on all your stuff. So keep that in mind. You can use something like a razor blade if you have access to that. I like to use plastic so I don't really scratch anything so much, not that I guess it really matters too much on the inside of your door, but it's really up to you. It's your prerogative. You do you, booboo.

Okay, so here we go. We've got this out of the way. I'm just going to go ahead and grab the glass. I'm going to try to lift it up and down. Moves up and down fairly decently. Definitely doesn't seem like it's getting stuck on this side, but I noticed towards the forward area of the door, it doesn't want to lift. So now what I'm going to do with this out of the way, I'm going to try to remove the speaker and see if I can get a view of what's going on back here, okay? There really isn't any place else to get in right around here. So this is going to be my access point. I'm just going to go ahead and take my Phillips head screwdriver, remove the four screw holes or screws there, and we'll get a clear view of what's going on in there.

Okay, last screws out. Let's go ahead and grab this right back here. A little push tab. Just give it a little squeeze, pull it out. There's our speaker. We'll set it aside so it doesn't get damaged. So now I can see inside here. Just going to go ahead and stick my hand in here again. Try to lift up all my glass. Okay, cool. So this is where the motor area is where it's going to bring it up and down. So now that I have this all opened up, I'm going to go ahead and hook up that window switch again. I'm going to try powering it up, and I'm going to try to take a peek inside at the same time, making sure that my hands are clear. I don't want to get any pinch points, and we'll go from there.

So here we go. I'm just going to plug this in. Okay. So now we're inside the door panel here. I can take this glass or I can take the glass and I can lift it up quite a bit like this, which tells me that the window regulator right here is no good. You can get the motor all the way over here and it's got some cables and they do their thing and one's supposed to lift up the window on that side and one lifts the window up on this side in the track. Something's going on where the window just isn't being able to go up level. So when I try to bring the window up, that's why we would hear the clunk noise. I would push the button and it would just kind of, clunk, kink the window in and basically lock it in so it wouldn't be sliding up perfect. It would go, and then stuck, right?

So yeah, so I got it like this now. You can move it around. You can try to get things moving. You want to be very careful for any pinch points. You don't want to get your fingers into anything where the window might pinch you somehow. And you want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses because we're messing with glass here, and safety first. This is a number one concern here at 1A Auto. So I'm going to try to make it go up real quick. So I've got it going. You can start hearing it starting to kink in, right? So I'm just going to lift up on the glass right here, being very careful of any pinch points. Looks like I'm clear. I'm going to go up some more. I'm just helping the window up here at this point.

So there we are. At least the window's in the up position, so in case it rains or pollen or whatever, you want your window up. So at this point what I would do is I would say that the window motor is getting power, obviously. The window goes up and down, makes funny noises, does everything it needs to do. So the motor itself is good, but something's going on with the window regulator tracks, whether it's the track itself or it could be the cables that are located behind there. So I would just go ahead and replace this window regulator. So that's that. Let's get this back together.

So now that we know what's going on in there, we're going to go ahead and order that part off of 1AAuto.com. I'm just going to remove this again, make sure my key's in the off position slash out of the ignition. I don't need to kill my battery, or the battery. And now I'm just going to get everything stuck back together here, and we're just basically just sticking everything on at this point. We're going to have it all back apart in a little while, or a couple days. So we've got our little connector here. We're going to put it right in the port on the speaker. Very simple. Just squeeze it together. My four screws, extra parts. I'm just going to start these in. I'm not going to tighten any of them down all the way until I get all of them started. Okay. Now we'll just snug them all up and then we'll move along.

Okay, so now it's time to go ahead and put this foam back on. We've got our little hook there. Hook here, one there, one there. I'm going to start here. I'm going to get this one on and then I'm going to bring it right down and clip, clip. Those are all going to go right into these, okay? Should be fairly simple. Let's give it a try and see just how simple or not simple it is. One, if we can figure out how to get this to roll in there. There we are. Beautiful. Get these lined up here, and I'm just going to bonk. There we are. Bonk, bonk. Looks like it's in like sin. Perfect.

Now we can grab that door panel and we'll get that on. So we've got our little wire here. It's nice and long. That means that it probably goes someplace way back here. This one's short. Means it probably go someplace a little closer up, right? So we'll put that through. We'll get this through. Get this stuff set up on here like that. I'm just going to get the top in first. Get our handle. Let's see if we can get it up and over.

Okay. Let me just show you what's happening here. Right along here, there's a lip. Right along there, there's a lip. This lip rides inside here, okay? So just so you know. I'm going to do it again now, this time for real. I was just faking it last time. So we're getting these things on here to start. It can be interesting sometimes. Get that pressed in along the top. Grab our wires. There we go. So it's coming along here. Okay.

So now we got all this. It's just going to go in. We can go ahead and put in all our screws going around the outside here. We got two big screws there. So we'll get all these screws in and then we're going to go ahead and put it in the rest of our molding pieces. So we've got our little quarter inch socket here and a little bolt. It's going to go on this bottom one. We're going to remember that.

It's going to get us started in there. Not going to tighten it up yet. I'm going to go around. I want to get all the rest of them started in. There we go. We can still move the panel around a little bit. It's very important. It's going to make so much more easy to get all the rest of them lined up. I've got my T20 again, same thing we used to remove them or move all these bolts. I'm going to grab them. I'll show you. Got a nice little stack of them. So we'll just go ahead and put all these in. Once they're all started, we'll tighten them up and then we'll come back up here and tighten these up as well.

There we go. Okay. There's all the side bolts. Now we're going to go ahead and tighten up those ones on the handle real quick. Got my quarter inch. There we are. Phillips head. Nice and tight, this piece right here. Once we roll, it's going to go right there. Okay. Going to get this all connected back in. Just connect the big one right here. There it is. Cool. Going to get this one. Make sure we're going the right way. Ooh. Touchy, touchy. Make sure I put it in the unlock position, right? We don't want to lock ourselves out. Okay. Now I did it. There we go. Now I'm cooking. Got all my wires back there. Everybody's happily where they want to be. Just going to give this a bonk. There we go. Just going to grab my last screw right there. We'll put that in. We'll put on our little trim piece right here. There's this little tab there. Nothing really too much right there. So we'll put that in. I'm just going to go ahead and slide in the backside. Perfect.

Grab my T20 again. Do a little cover. There's that. There we go. Got our mirror. Just going to grab the wire. I'm just going to clip right in the back here, right? We already took it out so we know we can go back in. Just get this around the backside there. Slide it in. Oops. I pushed the little switch through. Okay, there it is. Very nice. You get this little clip, this little clip and this one. We're going to put these on first, which is those, and then once we bring it around, we'll slap this one right in there, okay? So let's just try to get them lined up. Okay. Looks pretty good. Pop that in there.

Okay, let's give everything a try real quick. Try locking it. Locked. Unlocked. Very cool. I'm not going to try putting down the driver's window because we're going to wait for that new regulator. Passenger's side works. Let's try the mirror. Looks good. Perfect. So now we know we need a regulator. We've got the door panel back on. Once we get that regulator in the mail from 1AAuto.com, we'll be all set. We're going to know how to install it. It's going to be easy peasy. Make sure you check out that video. Thanks.

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