Rattling Inside Your Cars Door When the Window Is Down Diagnose Loose Window Glass

All right, let's get this thing out of here. What the heck was that noise? Figure that out later. Oh, it's raining. What is going on? Great. Unbelievable.

All right. Let's see what's going on. So, I just hopped inside the car, I went ahead and I shut the door and I heard a rattling noise going on. I looked down. I saw that I had a pocket that was full of tools. I work on cars all day. Why wouldn't it be full of tools? The only thing is, is even if took all these tools out of here and I went to move the door around, I think that there's something a little different going on in there. Obviously, it's raining outside like every day around here lately. I went ahead. I tried to put up the window and no glass came up. I could hear the window regulator functioning inside the door, so that tells me that I don't have an electrical problem but there's something going on with the glass. Let's get inside this door panel and figure it out. We're gonna be dealing with glass so of course, you need to make sure that you have hand and eye protection at all times.

All right. Now that this panel's off of here, I have a nice, clear view of what's going on. Right along this area right here is where my window regulator is. I have this shaft right up along there and then the other channel right along the other side. Down along the bottom areas are these. You can see the area where there's supposed to be, like, a little clampy-do that essentially holds onto the bottom of the glass. This feels like it's kinda nice and tight so I don't really see why the glass would have came out but as you can tell, the glass is sitting on the bottom of the door.

Yeah. That's our issue. Now with our fingers free and clear away from the regulator here, we're gonna see if it functions the way that it should.

This is perfect. Now with the key out of there, we can continue on to analyzing the situation inside the door itself. You can tell that the glass isn't sitting inside the channel where it needs to be. Obviously, this could be an issue. If for some reason you were doing a window regulator, you went ahead and you attached the window to the window regulator but the window wasn't sitting in the channel, it's gonna kinda bind up a little bit and then of course the window regulator's still gonna keep trying to do its job because the window motor is doing its job. It's gonna try pulling that down. The window's stuck, stuck, stuck. It finally breaks free and then everything just kinda goes crashing down into the door. In most modern-day cars, you're gonna have power windows. Back in the olden days, they had those crank windows and it took forever to make your window go up and down. Well, that was great and everything but as people were starting to go through drive-throughs such as maybe their local coffee store, they wanted to grab it on the fly. Nobody wants to sit there and crank that window. I'm sure there was other reasons but that's my reason why I would wanna have power windows, so I can get my coffee faster.

Now how does that work? Of course, you have the key in the on position. You go ahead and you take your switch and you're gonna either press up or down to make the window function. That's gonna send an electrical signal down to the motor right here. The motor's gonna go ahead and go on the back side there and that's gonna connect onto the window regulator. As the motor's telling the window regulator to go up or down, it's gonna do its job just like this.

So now at this point, we know that we don't have an electrical issue. Everything works as it should. The window regulator goes up and down as I flip the switch. If, for some reason, the regulator didn't work when I flipped the switch, that would tell me that there's more than likely an electrical issue and that would be a different diagnosis. The next thing that I wanna do is thoroughly inspect the window regulator itself. We wanna check these channels where this is gonna go up and down on and just make sure it's not bent or peened over in any way. You also wanna doublecheck the cables themselves to make sure that they're not broken or frayed or bent or twisted or anything the like. Anything like that could potentially cause a binding issue and you might have a window issue as well.

The next thing that we're gonna pay attention to is the window channels themselves. That's the area that the window's gonna be sliding up and down in. You wanna make sure that the channel itself isn't bent in any way or damaged and you wanna make sure that there isn't any debris or gunk inside here. Any of that could be binding up the window.

The channels look good. Let's move along to checking our glass. Now as you heard, this thing was just rattling around inside the door. So, the areas that you wanna check is down along the bottom where you can tell that it was kinda rubbing across and it definitely gave it a couple of bonks. If I was driving this down the road, there would of course be even more possibilities that I did damage to the glass. You need to make sure that you wear hand and eye protection throughout this whole process. I told you before, I'm gonna say it again. If you find a lot of glass like this in the bottom of your door, you know more than likely there's an issue with the window itself.

Just doublecheck the glass. Make sure it's good. After that, we're gonna continue on by starting to get this into the window regulator and see if we can get it mounted back up and get it functioning properly. Now before we go ahead and start putting this back together, let's just clean everything up. We've got the glass, as you can tell, down along the bottom here. This is just absolutely filthy and there's no way that those little clamps can hold onto this safely. Other than that, you're gonna of course have the window tracks. We wanna make sure that we clean those out from any debris like I said before and even up along this area here because that is still part of the track and then along the other side as well. Speaking of tracks, you also have tracks on your window regulator. Go ahead and make sure those are clean. And if you wanted to use a little bit of dry lubricant on that such as, like, a dry graphite spray, you can go ahead and put that on there as well.

Once you have everything cleaned and well lubricated as it should be, let's continue on by strapping up this window and holding it up. Now the next thing we need to do is put the key back in the on position and we're gonna very carefully bring the window regulator up to the point where we're gonna be able to access the clamping points. So, I have two holes in my door panel right here. I've got one right there that's an access point and then the other one's right over there. I'm just gonna carefully bring this up.

There we are. Now I can access both of my mounting hardware for this. Let's turn off the key. So, I loosened up both of my clamps here. Plenty of room for the window to slide down into. This is very important. The next thing we'll do is just go ahead and put this back up in here and then we're gonna carefully bring the window down so it slides into each of these clamshells and then we'll make sure we snug them up nice and tight.

All right. I'm just gonna start on a few of these bolts. Then we'll get the window down. We'll put it on there and then we're gonna test it before we put everything back together. Carefully remove the tape. I'm holding the window at the same time because I don't want this to drop down uncontrollably. Now I'll just carefully lower this down. Now what you can see is it dropped right past those tracks right there, so I just need to go ahead and bring it back up and then I'm gonna try to line it up.

That one's in there. Once you have it set down in, just take a peek inside. You wanna make sure that the glass is sitting down as far as it can inside of these clamps. If it's just barely sitting inside there, obviously, you're gonna have an issue. Doublecheck them both. Now let's just go ahead and hand-tighten these. That feels nice and tight. That's tight as well. All right. At this point, we're ready to start testing this. Make sure that everybody's far away from this only because if the window regulator releases from the window, the window comes down. Glass could go anywhere. All right. Let's go ahead and test this thing. Let's go up first. Okay. Perfect. Now let's bring it down. Perfect.

Yeah. Something to think about is if when you are putting up the window it started to kinda go off at an angle like this, that's telling you that the window's kicking in and something's off track. You need to ahead and take everything back apart and resituate it. All right. So now I've just gotta put this whole thing back together so I can get this out of here.

Oh, all right. Well, now it stops raining. Great. Well, I hope you liked the video. I hope you learned a little something. If you did and you wanna talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you feel as though this video helped you out and maybe you wanna share it with a friend, that would be amazing. Go ahead and click on that share button. Aside from that, make sure you comment and subscribe. Thanks.

How does it look?

You've got plenty of room. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Keep going, keep going. You have, like, a foot left.

Oh, this thing's beeping like a maniac.