Sometimes when I drive on the freeway and I saw some Honda cars with their driver windows out of the guide channels and stuck in the middle or totally sticking out of the door. I wondered how it could happen until my mother in-law 2005 Accord’s driver window failed to roll up. Again, the window glass is moving inside a rubber/metal guide from the bottom of the door up to the top of the door. I don’t know how, or what causes the glass to go out of the guide and rolled up outside the door opening, the door guide and the glass are curved therefore, when it’s out, it got stuck in the middle when the glass rolled up. My mother in-law took the car to the dealer and they’re too busy to even look at it, they wanted her to leave the car for a few days. Well, if something is mechanical, I don’t think it would be that hard to fix. It took me less than an hour to fix this problem.
Removing the door panel
There are the door handle, arm rest screws and the side view mirror cover need to be out to pop out the panel and lift it out. Make sure we rolled down the window glass all the way.
Sideview mirror inner cover. Now we need to pop out the panel, start from the bottom, side and look at the panel snap-on pins to see where to pry open, be careful not to scratch or dent the door.
Since the car has power windows, door locks, mirrors, we need to remove the door latch cable, then the plugs for these switches, do it carefully so don’t break any plastic hooks, they’re all plastic.
When the latch cable, the door light, the power switch connectors are disconnected, we can remove the panel out to have room to work on the glass and the window guide. We also need to remove the arm rest metal bracket
We think it’s better to remove the outside clip by removing the screw securing it.
We removed the middle bracket bolts holding the glass so we can move the glass up and down easily
Now we can remove the bolt holding the metal guide with the rubber insert
If we look inside the door by the latch, we can see the rubber channel inserted inside the metal guide, from the top of the window all the down. We pulled the rubber insert out completely, carefully not to tear it up.
We can see the rubber channel is inside the metal guide frame held by the bolt 10mm.
We have to move the glass up/down/side way a little to get the rubber totally down and out of the glass because the glass is now outside (OFF) the guided channel. Pull the metal guide frame out and down after the bolt is removed. Now we can see the window glass has no rubber and guide and we’re ready to slide the glass back inside the rubber and metal guide.
Put back the metal guide, slide the metal guide up with the glass inside it, it will snap into a slot by the door latch, we will see it, we want to make sure it seat in the slot correctly before we put back the screw holding it, if we can’t aligng the screw with the hole, the metal frame doesn’t seat in all the way with the slot by the door latch. When the screw is in, not too tight, leave it loose, slide the rubber from the top down with the glass inside the rubber channel and inside the metal frame, slowly, we spray some silicon lubricant so it can go down between the glass and the metal frame easier. We need to wiggle the glass up/down/side way a little to get the rubber to go all the way. Push the rubber guide completely inside the metal frame and we’re done. Tighten the metal frame screw.
Don’t forget to put back the 2 bolts holding the middle glass bracket. Plug in the power switch panel, turn on the ignition and roll the window up and down to make sure it’s smooth and in the rubber guide, when everything is working nicely up/down, put back everything and we save ourselves some money, time by taking it to the dealers or shops. The cost = 0, just about 1 hour. I can do this now for less than 30 minutes since I know how to take it out.
Putting everything back,
Don’t forget the door light fixture we took out.
Don’t forget the door latch cable, we did and the mom couldn’t open from the inside 🙂 It was dark.
Don’t forget to tighten all the bolts.
If the front door little panel taken out, put it back with the screw and rubber washer.
Don’t forget to plug the electrical connectors for the power switches, make sure they snap in.
Cheers,