Diagnosing Squeaky Windows in Your Car Truck or SUV

Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. I don't know if you've ever been inside your vehicle, you're driving down the road, maybe it gets a little bit chilly or you just want your window up. So, you put it up, you hear that noise. Well, that's no good. Nobody likes that sound. So, let's get into a quick diag video so I can show you a couple of different places where I would look for this issue. And make sure if you like this video, you like, you comment, and you subscribe. And while you're at it, doing all those things, hit that little bell at the bottom. That's the notification bell and it's going to keep you up-to-date on all of our latest content. Let's get started.

Okay. So, one of the first things we need to do is take off the door panel obviously. Once that's out of the way, we'll have a better view of what's going on. Here are some of the basic tools that you're more than likely going to need to take off your door panel. Something to pay attention to is you may be able to see some of your mounting screws as you come along here. They may be screws, they may be bolts, could be all sorts of things. Maybe even some push pins. This one actually feels pretty good. There's one right there. But something that I wanted to point out to you is on a lot of vehicles, especially up around the little door handles here, they'll have like this little cover. You just use a small pocket screwdriver. You can pop that off and you're going to see another mounting screw. Sometimes inside the handle here, you might find one, or even if you had to take this out right here, which this one doesn't come out, there might be another bolt under there. But I'm not going to worry about that for now. So, now, that I have all the mounting screws out, I'm just gonna go ahead and give this a tug. I'm going to be very careful because, obviously, there's going to be wiring that goes to these switches. There's going to be a little cable that goes to these, okay? And, of course, you've got your speaker down here. So, just be careful. Go ahead and lift up and out. This should come up. And this one. There it is.

Now that we have that unbolted, I'm just gonna bring this down. Okay. The window regulator separated from the window. That's great right there. I'm going to just go up and down. You can move along to just checking the regulator itself. To do that, you're just going to remove the mounting bolts. Now that we have a clear look at the inside of the door, we can see we have the window channels here. They should be nice and soft rubber, and they're not coming apart. And you want to make sure that they're not dry and brittle. They're not cracked. And, of course, they aren't bent over or anything like that. This floor one feels great, I can feel it all the way up. I'm gonna check this one as well, same way. Just run my finger right along that channel. Make sure there's no dirt or crud or anything else inside there. Yeah. This one was great too.

Perfect. So, once you're sure that none of that's the issue, we can move along. So, the next thing we're going to do is going to be very delicate. You're going to want to make sure you have your safety glasses and your hand protection. We're going to start removing this tape and we're going to try to slowly slide the glass down. Obviously, you don't want to let it go because there's nothing going to be holding it in. You don't want it to slam down and potentially break. And the last thing I want is for anybody to get hurt. Safety first. Here we go. Okay. Last one, I'm putting pressure on the glass, up against the door. Okay. So, I'm just going to go up and down with this a couple times. I'm just trying to see if it feels like it binds anywhere. This actually feels fair. Maybe a little bit tight, but no real movement. Anything that makes me feel like anything is out of whack. I'd say we can continue. Let's tape it back up.

Okay. So, let's start talking about this window regulator. We've got it on the bench so we can take a better look. The areas that you're going to want to make sure have lubricant, generally speaking, are any of the areas that move, okay? If there's any areas that move and/or touch, you want to make sure that you have lubricant between them. So, all up along here, you have this channel and that has these little white grommets that are going to slide inside of this window channel. As you can tell, it's got some crud in there and there really isn't very much lubricant. I like to have plenty of lubricant in there. So, what I would do is I would make sure I lube this whole channel on the edge on the inside there, the edge on the inside of this one and, of course, the inside there, okay? All along there. I will come right up here. This is a pivot point. Pivot points, you definitely want to lubricate. You can see that this has plenty of scratches on it, more than likely because there wasn't enough lubricant and the metal is just digging right in. So, this is a potential issue for that noise. Of course, you have this one over here. I already told you how to do the other side, but I would do the same on this one. You just lube all those little channels everywhere. You'd lube this side right here. That's another pivot point. It's the opposite side, okay? If you come along here, you've got all these little teeth, and that's where the motor is going to ride on. It couldn't hurt to just put a little bit of lubricant in there as well. Obviously, you have the spring, generally speaking, that's going to have a ton of lubricant on it. If it doesn't, just go ahead and add some more. If you see any other pivot points that I didn't point out, go ahead and put some lubricant on them. Maybe in between here, that could be a good idea as well.

So, I'll show you what I mean. I'll grab some of my little lubricant here, I'm gonna go right inside this channel and try to get right up along the top area there. I like it a lot. There we go. Fill it right in, okay? Right along the channel up inside this groove and the channel inside that groove. Let me grab some more, and along here, the same thing. Get inside that channel. This is great. I'm going right up along these, those pivot. Okay. So, if you can get a little bit of lubricant in those, couldn't hurt. See right down in there, there's literally no lubricant in between this little ball joint area. And, of course, there's minimal up here. So, I'm just gonna make sure I get plenty on those. So, now, that we've examined and lubricated our regulator, let's go ahead and put it back in and give it another try. Now that we have this all back in here, we're just going to get the window back down mounted to the regulator so we can continue testing. So, now that we've got everything back in and mounted for the window regulator to the window, I'm going to give it a try. I'm just going to go down all the way. And I'm watching these channels, okay? I'm paying special attention to this one because this is the one that I noticed had a major issue. And I can see the window coming right up along there. And it looks great the whole way.

But what I had noticed before is that when I brought this up right about there, it would start pushing this out as the window went up, and then it would start coming back again and it was fine. So, right along here is where it was binding. As the window regulator was trying to come up, the window regulator was kind of bending a little bit and flexing, and so it was pressing this the wrong direction. So, what I did is I came along in here, you can see these little arms right here. You take out these bolts that hold the glass again, get that glass held so it's up again and it's away from the window regulator. And then I just kind of pushed on this. I gave it a little push, and what that did is it just kind of flexed this arm in the opposite direction. All right. And it started taking pressure away as the window came up. So, I cured that problem just by fixing...it must've just had a slight bend in this window regulator arm right here. So, by pressing on it, it changed the whole geometry of everything and it slides up nice and perfect now. All right. So, after I lubricated everything, I checked for everything to make sure nothing was loose or broken. All that looked good, nice and lubed like I said, I put it in, and it was still kind of hitting up along here, all right? And that was worrisome to me.

So, like I said, I came down in here, I just took off the window bolts again. I gave that window regulator just a little tweak, a little flex, and it's working perfectly now. So, to get to the point, why I believe that maybe this window regulator got a little bent, it's wintertime here in New England. And so, your windows are up, you get in the vehicle, you're doing your thing. You want to put the window down, maybe get a smidge of fresh air, but it's frozen up, right? It's stuck. But you're still pushing that button, you're giving it a little press. So, the window regulator and the motor are trying to do their thing, like that, but they can't because it's frozen, it's stuck. So, it just flexes those plates, and next thing you know, they're a little bit bent and out of sorts. So, I just gave it a little tweak. It seems to be working perfect now. So, I'm going to get this all back together. So, now that we've got that window all back in here and we know it's working fine, something that you may notice is as you put the window up, it wants to come on back down to approximately here. That's because you're going to have to do a reset procedure that's going to reset the stop points for the window motor. So, it knows exactly where the top is and where the bottom is. You can look up that procedure pretty much anywhere, and I'm sure you'll find it.

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