Left Front Door Repairs

Another reason the Elgrand was at the dealership was due to a loud buzzing sound from the front left door power lock, every time the motor engaged the lock. The dealer suspected it was due to age, but for whatever reason they ran out of time to fix it or something. SO.... 

I found a used unit on Yahoo Auction for cheap

Not fun to take this mess apart....

Had to dig out my Torx 30 socket for this one. And on reassembly use blue thread lock.

Only two leads for power, why this huge coupler?

You can see my deadening work from before. I did not remove the window glass so I was lucky to have small hands to reach behind the metal frame to access the power lock unit.

The difficult part is getting the motor unit past this metal frame

The result? Yes it works quietly now, although I do hear a slight buzzing/whining which I hope is a lubrication issue. 

While I had the door open, I also tackled the power window - for some reason the motor was struggling to raise the glass - the dealer suspected the motor was going bad, or maybe a lack of lubrication. So they applied some silicon spray in the visible rubber molding areas, but obviously not inside the door, because the motor was still struggling to raise the glass.

So I got some silicon spray, and ran the window and down manually (half inch socket tip goes into the cable spool - Green Arrow - which uses cables to pull the window glass up or down).  I eventually even sprayed behind the spool, which greatly increased the speed at which the glass lowered, but raising the glass still seemed a bit tough.  Afterwards when I had put it all back together, I found that the left and right sides now lower at the same speed, but the passenger side is about a second slower than the driver side when raising. So maybe the motor is on its last legs after all?

So what next? One more thing the dealer didn't "have time" to fix. I guess I will have to research to see if this is worth fixing.  Oh and of course have to add some anti-scrape protection fo the front lip spoiler before the inevitable happens, knock on wood...