Friday, September 27, 2013

Passenger side DeLorean window stopped working

My wife and I had a baby earlier this month, so I haven't even thought of posting anything here for a while. I'll start by telling you about the passenger side window. My wife and I decided to drive our DeLorean in a local parade on Labor Day. On our way to the parade, it started raining, and raining hard. This would not normally be a problem, but our windows were down, and the passenger side window picked this day to stop working.

No matter how I jiggled the button, it would not do anything. While we were waiting for the parade to start, we covered the window with a towel to keep the water out, and luckily the rain stopped by the time the parade started.

A few days later, I was able to dive into the problem. I first suspected that it was the window switch, so I swapped it with the driver's side and the switch worked on the other side, but the passenger side still did nothing. I decided to start taking the door apart by removing the upper door panel. I thought that a connector had fried as I saw a connector with burn marks. After showing the picture to other DeLorean owners, I was told that this was not related to anything with the window. Here is the connector in question:
I was told that this connector was for the lock solenoid and lock switch, not the window. To get to the wires and connectors for the power window motor, I needed to remove the lower door panel. This is what it looked like with just the upper door panel off:

I didn't take any more pictures beyond this, but after removing the lower door panel, I discovered that one of the connectors to the motor had come loose. It was a bit hard to get it back in place as there wasn't much room to work with inside the door, but the window started working right away once I hooked it back up. Problem solved! Putting the door back together was very straightforward.