We passed!

GA came home from work on April 1... His car window was making funny noises and got stuck in the down position. I guess the car decided to play an April Fool's joke on us! Except we came out the victors!

It took over a week, over $100, and assembling over and over again...

But we have awarded ourselves a certificate:

'Achievement of motorized car window regulator replacement'.

First we had to figure out how to get the car door apart... (Isn't having Internet great? I was almost sure we were completely ripping the car apart! And the resale value (such as it is) was going to end up at $0.)


Then we had to figure out how it was supposed to work and what exactly was wrong... in the process we broke a few key components and found out that super glue really is super!


Finally we ordered a new part, waited for it to be delivered, completely took apart the old part only to find that when the new part arrived, it wasn't 100% compatible... (the plug was round instead of flat!)


So we took the part containing the flat plug out of the old part and put it in the new part. This is when we found that we had broken a key component of the old part in one of attempts to reassemble. After using the super glue to fix that, we got the motor working and then proceeded to put the part in the car correctly after several tries. Once the part was back in the car we discovered that something was wrong... When we pushed the UP button, the window went down, and when we pushed the DOWN button, the window went up!!

Now the decision was should we live with it, or should we try and take it back out and fix it??

Well, by now we were masters at disassembling the motor so decided for two more tries that might fix our problem. First we took the switch apart to see if we could just flip it - we couldn't. So then we took the motor apart and realized that if we flipped a piece over, it actually fit in the door much better.. not as many wires trying to lie in the same spot.... (Guess we hadn't had the part in the right way!) So we flipped it over, but still the switch was backward. Finally we rationalized that the magnets in the motor housing must be polarized in such a way that it determined the rotation of the motor... we flipped the housing over and...

VOILA! IT WORKS!!!

We now consider ourselves experts on the window motors of a '99 Olds Cutlass... So if you ever find that is your need, you now know who to call!!