Sunday afternoon I finally got around to tearing our broken Jeep Cherokee window regulator down and attempting to repair it using the kit I bought online. Before destroying the parts I had, I checked last week with a friend in the car biz who got me the wholesale price on an OEM replacement from Chrysler: $250, give or take. Trying to fix what I had for 1/5 that cost still seemed very reasonable to me, so under the knife my parts went.
The instructions provided were very clear and detailed, and I had little trouble adapting them from a 4-door model to our 2-door. After first trying to drill out rivets, I busted out the angle grinder and ground the tops off—and I have to wonder: WHERE HAS THIS MAGICAL TOOL BEEN MY WHOLE LIFE? That was the best $30 I’ve spent at Harbor Freight.
Once I had all the parts back together (and got the worm screw back on track after the guy at Mr. Tire ran the window down all the way) I went outside and tore the door down for hopefully the last time. After fooling around with the internal arrangement for a few minutes (and with the help of my lovely bride, who held the window up), I had the window bolted to the regulator, the regulator bolted to the door, and the switch attached to the motor. With fingers crossed, we put the key in the ignition and LO, THERE WAS POWER.
And just in the nick of time. We did some minor errands on Saturday—if you call hauling and tilling 10.5 cubic yards of manure minor—and the Jeep got very hot in the sunlight. Having one working window in a black greenhouse is a recipe for heatstroke; I’d hate to have Finn back there for any length of time without airflow.
I’d like to thank Stieger Performance, the folks who put the kit together and made it available, for their excellent service and a top-notch product. I’d like to thank my wife for waiting over a year for me to give up on finding a junkyard replacement, and dealing with limited airflow during her entire pregnancy. Finally, I’d like to extend a tall middle finger to the Chrysler Corporation, for their cheaply engineered plastic componentry, and for a confounding and inexplicable mixture of metric and standard hardware in the same vehicle.