How to Replace Window Motor 1994-2002 Dodge Ram 1500

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Tell you what we're going to be working on, our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. I want to show you something fairly basic, removing and reinstalling a window motor. It should be fairly easy. I can do it and you can do it, too. As always, if you need any parts, you can check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

We've got a couple of Phillips head screws, one here and one here. We'll take those out. We've got our two screws. They're both the same. This right here can move around now. That's nice. Cool. We've got another screw up here. Got that out of there. Looks the same as the other two. Nothing special. Set all three of those aside.

Now, this door panel, we're just going to feel around, make sure that there's no more screws. Sometimes you'll feel a couple coming along the bottom there. This does not feel like it has any, so we're doing all right. We have a couple of plastic trim tools. The reason why we're using plastic is because we're going to be going up against the paint, and if you're worried about your paint, then of course you don't want to scratch it up with metal. Come in right here like this. Just going to go right along.

Lift this up. As you go, you're going to just kind of jam towards the forward position, or I guess the front of the vehicle. There we are, and that's just because on the back side of this, you've got all these little clips and they go inside these hooky dos. These things, I don't know why Dodge did it, but they've got some so you need to slide straight up and down, you got some that you need to slide forward and back. Whatever, I'm sure they had their reasons, but anyway. We've got this almost off now. Now what we're going to do is we're going to get the wiring off of the back here. The next thing we're going to want to do is disconnect this right here. There's a little tab. You can usually grab it with your thumb. If you can't, small pocket screwdriver. Just grab it, pull it away. Give this top area a little wiggle. It should want to slide right out. Awesome.

Right here, there's a little tab. You can use your thumb if you want, try to push it. Just be careful for a pinch. I'm going to use this. Just going to push right here. That lets this come up. Now, if we come this side, we can lift right up on this. Awesome. I'm just going to go right like this and see if I can get it to go down and through. This is great. Now, we can get our door panel right out of the way and keep on plugging away. Here we are, friends. We've got our left-side door speaker here. We're going to remove the four Phillips head mounting screws.

That's what those look like. They're all the same. We'll set them aside so we can't lose them. Just going to grab the speaker, give it a little wiggle. It's been on there for a long, long time. Pull it out of there carefully. Before we remove that, I'm going to use my forky tool and go right along the door here and just try to get the connector to come off of the door. It's just held in by a little push pin. I'll just get this in there. There it is. That gives us a little more slack to see what we're dealing with here. You got yourself a little push tab. If you can't push it with your thumb, that's fine. Just use your pocket screwdriver. Go right in between here, give it a tug while you're doing it. There, it comes right off.

We want to check down along the bottom here. This is the channel. With our window all the way down, you can see where one of your nuts is right there, and that just kind of closes this clamp down and holds onto the window. I'm just going to take my 10mm, loosen that up a fair amount. It doesn't need to come all the way off. It looks pretty good. Do the same thing to this one. You can see it right through here. There, nice. Just give this a little wiggle. Awesome.

Now that we have both of these nuts loose, what we're going to do is we're going to try to slide this lower channel to the left so that the nut right there lines up with the hole. Make sure these are loose. That's good. I'm just going to stick my finger on the side. Just try to slide that over. Awesome. Cool. This looks like it's pretty close to being ready to come off here. There it is. Just get that out of there. There we go. Slide it up.

That's pretty good. Get our tape ready. Start from whichever side you want, inside, outside. Just stick it on there. Come up and over.

Awesome. Let's move along. We've got the window taped up. That's great. We have a bolt here, here, here, here, and then of course, this right here. If you don't feel like pulling off all this vapor barrier and potentially tearing it and causing a big old mess, just take a nice little razor blade, put a couple of little slashes just so you can get to where the bolt is and you can draw it out. You just pull it out through there and that's a much smaller issue than, of course, having a big rip in it. A little hole like this really isn't going to cause an issue because... I mean, meh.

Let's grab our 10mm. Right here, just go right on this one. That's what one of our bolts looks like, by the way. Bolt number two, same as the first. Awesome. We're going to keep on rolling here. There we go. I think this one is the pepper, boy. Awesome. Just get our bolt out of there. That's another shorty. You got one, two, three, four shorts and two longs. Look at our electrical connector right here. Try to get this off of there. You just pull the little tab and you should be able to pull down. Awesome. We're going to bring this over. Now, we're going to do whatever we have to do to get it out of this door. Careful for any pinch points.

Ta-da! We have our window regulator unit here and the motor is still attached. What we're going to do, we're going to take out these three 10mms. You need to be careful because a lot of times this is under spring tension, which is right here, and the motor could be holding this cog in a spring-loaded position, so once we take this off, the spring might want to say, "I've had enough of this. I'm out of here." This gear could come spinning, so just be super careful for any pinch points and let's continue. 10mm.

Things are getting loose here. That's one screw, two, all three are out. This hasn't done anything crazy yet, so that's kind of cool. I'm just going to give the motor a little bonk. There we go. That came right out of there. It was under spring tension. Awesome.

All right, friends, so here we go. It's time to install our motor onto our regulator. To do that, we're just going to take this and we're going to be careful because this is going to put it under slight spring tension right here. As we turn this, this spring is starting to get tighter and tighter and it wants to let go. You can start it wherever you want. Now, we're going to take our motor. We're going to line up our three holes with the three holes in the regulator. It should just set right in just like this. That looks great. I'm going to turn the whole unit over and now I can see my screw holes from the back side. We'll take our three bolts that we have here. They're just 10mm heads, same bolts we removed. I'll start it in here. Let me get that in and there it is. This one.

We're not going to tighten any of these up until we get them all started. That's very important in case you have to wiggle this motor around. That looks pretty great. Awesome. Let's snug them up. That's tight. Just take it to the point that when you're tightening it bottoms out and then just a teeny bit more. That's all you have to do. You don't have to go too tight on it there, Hercules. You don't need to use a 1/2" air gun or anything crazy like that. Just a little 1/4" ratchet, bottom it out, and then give it a little extra. This unit is ready to be installed into the vehicle. Let's do it.

Now that we have this all together and waiting for us, I'm just going to plug it in. There we go. Hold onto the motor itself. There we are. I'm going to disconnect this and I'm going to turn off the keys to the vehicle and we can continue. We're just going to start a couple of these bolts and this one right here. It's easiest to do this before you get it in the door. Once it's in the door, sometimes getting these started isn't the easiest. Just a couple of threads, we don't want them tight because obviously they have to hold onto the door. We're going to get this inside the door. We're going to slide these down into their corresponding holes. Once they're in there, it'll kind of hold that for us and we can continue.

This just slides in all the way down there. I've got one of my screws right there. See if I can find the other one. Awesome. This one is sitting down here and that one is sitting there. Once we push this, these should line up. Grab some more of our bolts here.

There we are. Now, we've got this arm. We're just going to bring that up to where it belongs. We're going to line up these holes with the holes up here. You can see one of our holes.

I'm not going to tighten it up yet because I still have to get the other one started. Just get it started in. Six bolts are started. Just double check. Looks good. Now, we're just going to snug all these up and then we can move along to the next step. There we are. Awesome. Let's move ahead to the next step. I'm just going to plug this back in. Trying to get our speaker connected in. I'm just going to try to grab the electrical connector. Airlock, lock there. That should slide in. Give it a tug. Nice. I'm just going to bring this down here, get the little push pin pushed into its hole. Just press that into its hole. That holds it nice and tight. Take our speaker and mount it up.

We're just going to put the key in the on position. We're going to bring this. We got this hole here, this one right here. We want to make sure that we can see it because we're going to need to tighten up the bolt that's going to be right there. Once you get it to a good working level, turn back off your key power. Here comes the fun part. This is where we're going to be bringing the window back down, so you want to make sure that you don't have anything slippery on your hands. You're going to be grabbing the glass, slowly lowering it down and trying to line up those bolts with these holes right here and then sliding this in to latch it in. Here we go.

I'm just going to leave the tape dangling on there in case I need to put it back up for any reason. It's doubtable, but you never know. Going down. See right here. There's one. Bring it down just a skosh more. Push that in. Slide this over hopefully to lock it. Well, maybe. Awesome. Both of those studs are through this rod, and then the nuts are holding it into the locked position, so we're just going to snug these up and then we'll test the function of the window before we continue.

We're going to put the key in the on position. Awesome. We're just going to test the window and make sure it goes up and down. Upsy daisy, and down. Ooh, very nice. I'd say that that works pretty good. I'm going to leave it just like this because, what do I have to do now? I'm going to have to clean this down at the end, so I'll leave it right there. Take my key out of the ignition and now we can continue.

It's going to be time to get the door panel on here. Before we go ahead and do that, we're going to take out all of these push pins and we're going to put them right into the door panel and then we'll put the door panel in and the push pins will hold it into the door. To do that, you're going to use something as simple as this. It's a little forky tool. Just like that, give it a little twist, whatever you got to do to get these puppies to pull out. They make them nice and long for you. They look like they got like a little ear there and that's where it's going to slide over the door panel, and then these little ears right here are what hold into this hole. We'll take all of these out and we can continue.

These little tabs, the push pins, got that area right there that I showed you before. It just slides right in. Bonk. There we are. Do the same for all of them, and then we can continue. Okay, friends, let's get this door panel on. I'm going to take the electrical connector, or the electrical harness here and try to bring it up and through this. It can be a little tricky sometimes. Try to get out of the way. Just give it a... There it is. You just have to be a little forceful with it sometimes. That's okay. We've got our electrical connector right here for our mirror switch. We're going to plug that in. You can tell which was it goes because it has this little nub right here, and that lines up with the nub in there. Slide it in, give it a tug. Don't pull the whole thing off the door, though. Get that back on there. Cool.

Let's bring this up. What we're going to pay attention to now is the door handle. We're just going to try to pull the door handle through its hole. Slide this over. Awesome. We've got our lock. Just take the lock, just bring it right through the hole. Awesome. Bring the door panel down, get it so all of our little push pins/pitons are going to be lined up with our holes. Once you get a couple of them started in, generally speaking, all of the rest will be lined up. The hardest ones for me to see are the top ones, but it is important to get them lined up.

Down along our side here. Same thing along this side. Just line up as many of them as you can before you start bonking them in. One in the center here that is lined up but not going in. There it is. Oh yeah. Awesome. You just want to make sure that your door lock can flow up and down easily. If it can't, this can be wedged a little bit. Maybe the bar got bent in some of the process that you were doing. If that's the case, well, you're just going to have to pop this back out of the way and see what you can do about bending it because you want this to make sure that it can go up and down. That looks really great. I would say we can continue.

Now, we're going to take our long screw and we're going to go right up in here. I'll just try to find the hole real quick and then we'll get out of the way. There it is. We don't need it to be too tight. We don't want to break the plastic or anything, we just need it to pull this right up against. That looks pretty great. We can move along. Grab our switch here, it's just going to slide in. Let's take a look at it. It goes in back side first, and then the front side. Bonk, bonk. Very nice. We're going to grab our little cup with our two mounting screws. Put it facing the right way. You got your holes. You can see where it goes right down into the door. Phillips head. Start that one in. Start this one in. We're just going to bring it all the way down. That's snug. Awesome.

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