Fair warning. Later I will edit the crap out of this post to add info, details and more pictures make it a little better to read.

The drivers door window on my '95 XJ would not roll up. The crank handle turned but just skipped in the regulator. I'll skip the door disassembly part and get right to the rehabbing the regulator.

With the regulator on the bench first thing I did was drill off the flanges of the circular staking that holds the two halves of gear box together. I only took off the top of the flanges and did not drill all the way through.I stopped flush with the surface of the gear box. That left metal that was need for aligning the case halves come time for reassembly. Next was clean up and grease the gear box innards and set the halves aside for now.

Next I used a screw driver and needle nosed pliers to gently splay the ends of the regulator split tube / cable guide and then pulled the cable out. As suspected the tail end of the cable was rusty and worn where the window crank gear teeth meshed with the coil cable when the window was all the way down. The head end of the cable is pristine so all that was needed to get it going again was to swap ends.

The head assembly is two parts, a plate which is punch staked to the butterfly and the butterfly which is screwed onto and firmly clamped to the cable. The butterfly will NOT un screw from the cable. Period.

Next order of business was to set it up in the vise and grind the heads off of the two mushroom punch stakes that hold the head plate to the butterfly. I used a 2 inch 80 grit sanding disc to take off most of the mushroom head off and switched to a 120 grit to not take off too much at the the finish line. With the head plate removed from the butterfly I set it the butterfly up in the vise and carefully center punched the two spot welds in the butterfly's waist located next to where it wraps around the cable. Accuracy was important as the room for error is small. I pilot drilled all the way through with a #40 drill bit and then punched the two holes up a size with a #30 and used a stiff putty knife to spread the butterfly open just enough to loosen it its grip on the cable so it could be unscrewed from the pristine end and reinstalled on the rusty end.

I screwed the butterfly onto the rusty end and clamped it back tight with a pair of needle nosed vise grips. Small steel screws and nuts through the holes would have been a great replacement for the two spot welds that were drilled out but I didn't have any so I used two solid rivets. Holding the pieces and riveting requires three hands. I only have two so the results while effective are not pretty.

Fit checking the cable in the split tube revealed that the rivet heads and tails where hitting the split tube and needed a little relieving with a Dremel.

Next up was put the head plate back on the butterfly. Before I did that I used a larger drill bit to cut a chamfer in the the holes in the butterfly wings where the hollow stumps of the two mushroom stakes of the head plate fit into the holes of the butterfly and then I used tapered punch to stake / spread those hollow stumps out into the chamfer. Sanding the galvanizing off the mating faces of the butterfly and head head plate and then slapping a layer of J-B weld between them would have been an effective and pretty back up to the staking but I didn't have any J-B Weld so I put in solid rivets instead. Then I sanded the heads and tails down for clearance.

Next was put the gear box halves back on the split tube. The tube has a pair of indexing bumps that engage small cut outs in the box and it can only go together one way. I like it when they make things stupid proof. I put the gear box halves on the split tube and clamped them together with a pair of vise grips and used four short 1/4 inch bolts and nuts to replace the flanges of the circular staking that was drilled off.

Bench test complete I threw some epoxy paint on the raw metal surfaces and squeezed the ends of the split tube back to what they were in the beginning.

The regulator is in and the window works like it should just in time to keep the rain out of my left ear..


Pics.

First pic showing the back side of the reassembled regulator gear box with nuts and bolts through the hollow stumps of the mushroom staking that replace the mushroom heads that were ground off.




Second pic is to show the rusty end is now attached to the head plate.




Third pic:



White arrow indicates one of two mounts attached to the split tube that bolts to the entire regulator assembly to the door.
Yellow arrow indicates the butterfly described in the post.
Green arrow indicated head plate described in the post.
Red circle indicates one of the two butterfly to head plate rivets installed through the hollow mushroom stakes as described in the post.

The round white plastic wheel with tab sticking out and a metal center is the remains of the old shattered window. ( don't ask )

Q and A

Why bother with repair instead of replacement in the first place ?
The supply of OEM replacements has dried up and the aftermarket doesn't make them.

Why not grab a used one off of eBay ?
1. I needed it right now. 2. they are expensive on eBay. 3. repairing mine leaves one more used one available for another forum member who might not have a work bench etc. to do this. 4. I like fixing things like they did before everything became a throw away.

Why didn't you just use a coily cable / regulator cable out of a power window regulator ?
The pitch of the helical winding on the regulator cable that the gear teeth engage is different on a power window regulator cable.

How come no before or during pics ?
The weather was turning to crap so I was "well motivated" to get it done ASAP.

 

Cool. I need to do this one day. If I roll the windows down all the way, I have to help it up the first few inches or it ratchets.

 

Thanks for the write up. This is on my to-do list also.

Mine gets stuck if I roll it all the way up or down.

 

If it gets stuck / skips when it's all the way up and and all the way down, your spiral drive cable may be worn at both ends. These cables were used in manual regulators in several brands of cars. If you can't find a Jeep in the wrecking yard you might try looking inside the doors of other domestic vehicles of the same era.

Word to the wise. If your window is all the way down, DO not use any tools to pull the window up.. They can and will chip the edges which causes these tempered safety glass windows to shatter.

 

excellent and well timed find. i'm doing the same thing to an 89 xj but i bought a manual cranked regulator on the assumption my entire cable is toast. thank you so much.

 

I did the very same fix on my 88, only the drivers side was bad. Since I had the whole thing gutted I did the passenger as well, it is a very quality fix and its hard to find a yard rig that still has the regulators.

 

 

This is true. I looked for well over a year before I found a good one at a wrecking yard. I found lots of power window XJs before I found a manual window XJ that worked properly. I grabbed the window too because as mentioned by the OP someone had used pliers on mine and chipped it. If you even think you'll need one start looking.

 

​​​Five year update: The windows still working and my left ear is still dry.