How to Replace Window Motor 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Len: Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser and I want to show you to do a window motor. It's going to be a fairly easy job and I wanted to be the guy that shows you how to do it. So if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

So here we go. One of the first things we're going to do, now that the door's open, we're going to get behind this right here. Take something small like a pocket screwdriver or whatever you have that you can wedge in there, pry this up, let's see, there we are. Behind here there's a little push clip. Always take a look at your wiring, make sure there's no funny colors. That one looks good. Tuck it away for now. Okay. Take a look behind here. Okay. Don't see any bolts, anything that's holding our panel on, so let's move along.

Right here there's a little cover. See if I can get my pocket screwdriver in there. Looks like there's a Phillips head screw. So let's remove that. We've got another one right here. Another little panel looking thing. Let's see if I can get it. Cool. What do we got? Looks like a Phillips head. Awesome. Let's see if can get in. Phillips head number two. It's a little longer than the first, so I'll try to keep that in mind. Here's what we're dealing with, short one up top, longer one down bottom. Okay? Let's move along.

Right here there's a little push clip. All you do on these is you push in the center. Let's see if I can get it. There you are. Once that's pushed in, it's in the unlocked position. You should be able to grab the outer ring of the push pin, slide it right out. Okay? To reset that all you do is you just push it all the way through like that, now it's good to go. When you go to reinstall it, you want to have the pin facing out, put it in your hole, push this in so it's flush, and now it's in the locked position. Oh, watch out for that. Cool.

All right. Now let's just a feel around, make sure there's no more bolts. Feels pretty good. Cool. All right. Let's move along. We'll grab our door panel tool. I'm going to grab one more, a little thicker. I'm going to show you how to get this off. So, now we're just going to feel along the bottom. Feel where our door panel is. Let me see if I can get my plastic tool up in between here. It's really in there. Cool. Okay. Grab one that's a little stronger. Just going to come around. A couple of little pins. Those ought to slide right back in, easy-peasy. I'll show you in a minute. Got it.

So, behind here, we have our cables, okay? This one's the door lock, one on the top. This should be right in here, so I'll put it in to show you. Okay. Assuming it's where it should be, which is where it is, all you do is take the white, you pry it away and you lift right up through there. There's a little slot. Okay? Just comes through like that. Easy-peasy. Next we're going to take the green one, do the same thing, remove those. Now we've removed our left front door panel. Easy-peasy.

Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and take off this vapor barrier right here. To do that just grab a little tab, pull along. This black stuff right here is super sticky and it will get pretty nasty on your clothes if you get it on your clothes. So keep that in mind. If you get some on your clothes, it's going to become an issue trying to do some laundry. Let's see about getting this off. I'm trying my darnedest not to tear this vapor barrier too much, the plastic aspect of it. I'd like to stick it back on if I can. There we are. A little bit of chewing gum. Don't really chew on it. It's probably not the best for you. And now we've removed our vapor barrier.

So here we go. We're going to remove this 10. Show you what it looks like. Going to remove all four of them. Hold my plate. And our plate. Wide end goes at the bottom. In case you mix it up and you forget. Don't worry, these are further apart than those. Easy-peasy. We'll set this stuff aside.

Okay. So we're going to reconnect this again. I know it seems weird, up down, up down. Every time we've done it, we've had to do it though because it had to be all the way up to get to the original part that we're working with. Now we have to bring it down because behind here, right about ... right about here, but it's up in here, there's a bolt. I'm going to try to bring it down to here where I can get it and then there's going to be another one behind this plate I'm going to get. So I'm going to bring it down. Let me plug it in.

So here we go. We have one there and now I'm going to take off this plate and we'll have another bolt behind there. So let's go ahead and disconnect this again. There we are. Now we're going to disconnect our wire harness for our window motor. There's a little tab in between these wires. Just grab it, take a peek, make sure there's no funny colors, there's no green or blue or rust or anything like that. This looks good. We don't have to worry about it. Now we're going to remove this plate right here. We're going to use 10 millimeter, or you can use a Phillips head, whatever you have access to. Set this aside. I'm going to grab my plate. Last one, same as the other three. I'm going to lift this off. There's our plate. As you can tell it has a little area right here, where the wiring's supposed to go through, so when we go to reinstall it, just make sure you have it that way. Doesn't go like this, obviously the bolt holes don't line up that way. You also don't want to crush the wiring. Okay?

So there we are. Now, we have this bolt right here and then if you were to follow this channel, comes all the way through here and then on the inside in there there's another one that looks just like it. So I'm going to go ahead and remove it. I'll do this one real quick so I can show you what it looks like. There it is. Okay? This just holds the window in. All right? So I'm going to go ahead and do that one. I got this out. We're going to wait one second on the other one. We're going to grab some tape. We'll tape this window so it can't go anywhere and then we'll move along.

I'm going to use a little bit of painter's tape here. You can use whatever kind of tape you have, boxing tape or whatnot. If you use duct tape, you have to remember the glue on that is super sticky, so it's going to stick pretty good to anything you put it on, the plastic on your window louvers, the paint on your vehicle. Just use some painter's tape if you have it. Nice big strips, okay? This stuff isn't very expensive, especially in comparison to the cost of a window. So, bring this down. You can do two or three of these strips if you want, or more, whatever you feel comfortable with. Like I said it's probably a pretty expensive window. Good. Love it. Perfect.

So now when we go to remove the bolt right there, the window's not going to be able to drop down at that point, okay? So we'll go ahead and remove that bolt and then we can start doing the rest of it real quick. Let's see. I'm going to grab my ratchet, that's going to make my life a little easier to get into this one. Just a quarter-inch ratchet. So I'm going to use my 10 millimeter with my ratchet. There isn't very much room in here, but try real hard. You can at least get the socket on to break it free. Just give me one second here, I'm hoping that I'm close at this point. Yep. Whew, there it is. See it was a little curved in there, so I'm trying to grab onto this and turn, turn, turn, and it was just fighting me the whole time. Anyway, I got it. I'll set that with the other one. Cool beans. Should be able to lift up on the window a little bit here. Yep, comes right up off the regulator. Okay? So that's good. Very nice. We still got our tape. Tape's looking good. Perfect.

All right. Excuse me. So we've got a couple, or a few, 10 millimeters. 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. Let's remove all these, with my socket. We'll leave that one in for now. Come over here. All right. So let's get the last one out. We're just going to hold our window regulator. Last bolt, same at the others. Cool. Here we go. Let's see if we can get this out of here. Here's our regulator, with the motor assembly.

Okay. So what I'm going to do now, is I want to make sure that I explain to you, there's going to be a spring tension behind here. Right here, got a little spring. Okay? When your motor turns the cog, it's going to apply pressure with that spring right there, and that's going to help your window go up. Just show you one more. We've got a new one over here that I can show you. This Quality 1A Auto part here. Essentially your motor will be right here, and then this thing comes around. Right? And that's what's going to make your window go up and down. So it wants to go on its own, go back that direction, so you want to make sure that you're very careful in case there is spring tension, you don't want to catch your fingers in there. Okay? It's not a lot of spring tension, but it might be enough to hurt you. So I wanted to make sure that you knew about that.

With all that said, let's go ahead, talk about how we're going to get the motor off of this. These right here, are Torx bit 25s. So T25, they look like this, they're little stars. Okay? There's three of them. That's going to remove the motor. Once this comes loose, whatever spring tension's there, is going to do its thing, so you want to make sure that you're not in any pinch points, okay? This is super important. You can hold it just like this if you want. So I'm going to try to break all these free. There's one screw. I'm sure they all look the same. Screw number two, same as the first. Here we go. Okay. Being careful for pinch points, there we are, it's going to want to spring a little bit.

Okay, so now it's time to go ahead and install the motor onto our brand new regulator, or your old regulator, whatever you're dealing with. For me personally, I'm replacing the regulator. So I want to make sure that I have some of the gear, or some of the teeth of the gear, showing right there. I'm just going to get these holes lined up. Grab my little bolts. See if I can get one started here. Okay. I'm not going to tighten it down until I get them all started. Okay. Now that we've got them all started in, we're going to go ahea and tighten them up. Nice and snug. You want to make sure that they're tight enough so they won't loosen up. Obviously you don't want your window motor moving around inside your door panel there. Okay. Cool. This looks good. Now we're clear to go ahead and install this into the vehicle.

Okay, so we've got our window regulator here. Just goes pretty much like this. This goes up along the window to where those two bolts were. This right here, goes there. All right? To get it into the door, just going to condense it all down. Oh yeah, these go here, by the way, and this goes ... coming over there. So let's just figure out how we want to get it ... just weaseled into the door here. I'm going to find one of my screw holes with my thumb, right there. Okay. Not tight. I can move this around. I'll just get one more in there. It's going to hold this from moving around too much on me. Still not tight. Okay.

I've got the upper swing arm of the window regulator. Let's see if we can get it to slide where it needs to go here. There we are. The bolt hole lined up there. Going to look inside the door panel, the other side looks like it's lined up perfectly as well. Cool. Okay. This right here, little secondary bar, just lines up there. Okay? Just get all of these bolts started in here. Looks like that popped out. Let's get the window mounted on there first. It might be a little easier. Do the other one. See if I can get my hand in here. Okay. Let's see if we can get this going. There we are. Give it a couple of good threads. Nice. Okay. Started, started. Cool. We can go ahead and snug these up if we want. Use your ratchet, use whatever you've got. There we are. You can get this other one tightened up. I'm going to try using one of my ratchet wrenches here, see if I can get it close, and then I should be able to get the rest of it hopefully with my socket. Come on baby. There it is. Okay.

So both of those are tight. That's the window to the regulator bolts. We'll start on the rest of these. Okay. We got these right here. You just want to be careful tugging on this because as you pull, the window is moving as well. Just get that lined up. Cool beans. Okay. Got everything all started. Let's go ahead and tighten them up. Okay, so that's the last of those four. Move over here. Of course take the tape off too. Okay. Very good. Just going to take off one side of the tape. I'll leave it hanging there for now, just in case. I don't anticipate any issues. Let's plug this puppy in. Key on. All right. It's not binding anywhere. Seems to be working just fine. Perfect. I'll say we're clear to move on to the next step.

Time to get this plate back on here. We've got four bolts. One, two, three, four. The bottom side is the wider side. So just get down here, we'll get them all started in. Bonk, bonk. There we go. Cool. Let's move to the next step. So we've got this plate. We got this little cutout right here, or indent. Just going to go right there. Okay? Just like that. Grab my bolts. Got four of them. Just going to go ahead and put these back in. All tight. Good to go. Let's move to the next step.

Okay. So we've got our vapor barrier. Goes something like this. You got your little blue area, that goes up on the top left. The reason for that is because that's where your cables are going to slide through. So being careful of all that black goo, like I said in the beginning of the video, super sticky. It'll ruin your clothes. It will get stuck on your arm, be stuck there for days. Just go ahead and see about getting everything stuck back on here as good as we can. Once I get it kind of pretty much where I want it, I'll go back around and I'll stick it on there, good. Okay. Got it all lined up. Just going to follow the track here. Push it on all the way around. Cool. Very nice. All right. Let's move to the next step.

Okay, so now we can go ahead and put our rubber back in here. Just like that. Boop. Easy-peasy. So on your door panel, you'll notice that you have a whole bunch of these little clips, right? Maybe when you were taking it off one of them came shooting off like this one. Little piton. You take it, just going to slide it in the hole. There we are. All the rest of them are still on there, so I'd say we're clear to move on to the next step, getting our panel on.

We'll bring it over. I'm going to take this back off of here real quick. Cool. We've got our cables. All right. The white one goes on top, green one on the bottom. So that means that the white goes for the lock and the green goes for the handle. So you're going to start with the bottom, that's what I do. Just going to slide it in. Slide it in there. Same thing for here. Okay. Easy-peasy. Grab our little cable, get it up where we need it. The door panel itself, kind of has like a little hook like this, it's going to sit down over this. All right. I'm just going to bring it up and bring it down, set it right down along there. Here we go. It's time for the fun part. Going to bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk. It's my thing. Cool. Feels like it's nice and secure.

We've got a screw hole, a screw hole, a little push button and then our switch. Let's do it. Big screw goes in the lower hole. See if I can get my head in there. Okay. Close that puppy up. Very nice. We have our next screw. These are just screwing into plastic, so you know you don't have to get too carried away with tightening them down. There we are. Close this up. All right. Should want to stay, but why doesn't it want to stay? Hold on. Try that. There we are. Cool. Connect our switch. It's going to go in there like that. And this is just going to sit down in there like that. There we are. All right, so we got this down, let's move along. We'll get in this one last little push clip here. Here we are.

Now let's test everything. Grab the window, good. Door locks, good. Let's test the latch of the door handle. Perfect. Great job everybody.

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