So over this past weekend, after going out for a drive and coming back home my driver side window made a crunching type noise going up. After taking the door panel off, i realized that the cable that raises and lowers the window is starting to fray and is jamming the power window motor. Has anybody had any luck fixing this aside from replacing the entire motor/regulator assembly? I really dont want to spend 100 bucks just because a cable is fraying.

You should be able to advance the motor out by hand, and switch out the cables. (Note: I haven't done this myself). But once you get it out, you should also be able to swap cables with one from a junk yard.

You'll have to replace the cable/regulator unit. You shouldn't have to get the motor. Brand new I think it was $90 from the Toyota dealer when I did my driver's window.

It is possible to remove the damaged strands, i wouldnt bother if its more than two strands because the others will just break from the strain at that point.

It's really difficult to remove the damaged strands and it's HIGHLY likely that you're just going to have the same problem again. You're really MUCH better off replacing the regulator; it's not that difficult and if you don't want to fork out $90 for it from Toyota, check http://www.car-part.com for a national junk yard interchange where you can source it from a yard.

Well i've decided to make an attempt at fixing it with replacing everything. I pulled the entire motor/regulator assembly out of the door tonigh and plan to visit home depot tomorrow to get some cable. If this works, I'll let you all know how it goes.

So i just finished up putting it all back together. Yes you can replace just the cable. After removing the regulator/motor assembly from the car, i took the silver cover off the motor and popped out the pulley inside. After unwinding the cable and cutting off the bad half, I cleaned and re-greased all moving parts and the cable itself. For the new cable, I used a hood latch cable from a Volvo. I filed down the lead ball on one end of the cable to get it square off, so that I could fit it in the motor. I thread the new cable through the intermediate pieces and on the other end, I took a small nut and used a vice to crimp it on the cable. Wound it back around the pulley and stuck it back into the motor. After reassembling it all, worked great. I highly recommend this to anyone with a similar problem as it saves a bundle of money.

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that is quite ingenious. I would have simply replaced the entire regulator with a new one.

Just as a follow up. This week the nut worked its way of the end of the cable and my window came falling down. I still believe this is a more effective way of fixing the window regulator that just replacing the entire thing but you would need to find a better way to attach a stopper to the end of the cable. As a side note, I've tried melting lead onto the end but the cable pulled off of the lead with the weight of the window on it. I've resorted to pulling a regulator assembly off the passenger side of a junkyard celica with crank windows and resourced the cables to fix my driver side power window.

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