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Repairing/replacing the window shade motor
Recently the sun shade/privacy screen on my rear passenger side door started to malfunction. The motor would still activate and the shade would come up about a third of the way, get stuck, and move up and down rapidly. As I started to research the issue I found that there are typically two common failures: 1) The gears inside the shade motor fail or 2)The motor itself fails. I would like to thank jayi836 from a different forum for posting about his experience as thats where I drew most of my information for my repair. I wanted to add a DIY here so it could be easily found and easy reference for future owners with this problem. General Information: -If you decide to replace the motor it is Porsche PN# 958536318013w4, you may need to specify side when you order. It can be found for $300-400. -If you need gears they are available from Bross Auto Parts out of Turkey but can also be found on eBay/amazon. -If you end up replacing the gears I would have some kind of a lubricant available to grease your new gears. I am not an expert but chose to use a silicone paste type lubricant, white lithium paste might be another option as well. Your call. Steps: 1) Remove the outer door panel. There are several good instructional videos on youtube. This process is very straightforward, just be gentle with your interior pieces so you don't break the plastic tabs or scratch your leather. You may want to have an assistant present when you actually remove the door panel to make it easier to unhook the wires and door latch cable. Having someone there to hold it up while I unhooked everything would have been nice. In addition you will need to unhook the fabric sunshade from the metal rod that moves it up and down. Just open up the flaps and expose the top of shade, in the middle you will see a small rubber piece that I removed with a small needle nose pliers (dont lose it). Once its out simply pull the shade up and it will slip off of the metal rod. 2) Now that you have removed the outer door panel you will see the exposed metal rod and the plastic tube it slides in at the top center of your door. I was able to remove both by simply pulling them upward and out of the door. https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...883df461ad.jpg 3) Now its time to remove the motor. It is located at the bottom of the door next to the speaker and can be seen in the picture/diagram below. Unhook the motor from the power source and remove the three bolts that hold it in place. https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...65642d3f0b.jpg https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...4c73870d28.png FRONT VIEW 4) The rest of the motor assembly is behind the inner door panel and is held in place with two torx screws and retaining bracket. In order to access them I simply removed the speaker and loosened the white plastic retaining screws that run around the outside of the panel (see picture above). The diagram below shows how the motor assembly is mounted to the back of the panel: https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...8ef435b4b8.png REAR OF PANEL VIEW 5) Once you have the two screws/bracket you should be able to remove the motor by rotating and pulling downward. 6) If you are going to replace the entire motor assembly simply reinstall your new motor and go backwards from here. 7) The last step is to set the shade up limit: Close to retract it, then raise the shade. If it automatically closes, raise it again while keeping finger on switch, then hit the down switch to stop the travel when fully raised. That will set the upper limit. It took me a couple of tries to get it set properly. |
Repairing the shade motor
Repairing the motor assembly:
If you decide to try and repair the gears like I did you will need to open up the motor assembly. I removed the torx bolts and the assembly opened into three pieces. https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...13cb1a8806.jpg The gears are right there and it will be apparent if they have failed: https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...a8715e5a96.jpg https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...bc00720b74.jpg I was in luck and hopeful this would save me from the expense of a new motor. I went ahead and ordered new gears and they arrived in roughly 5 days. The only tricky part of the install was removing/installing the plastic gear that mounts on the metal piece as seen above (not sure of the proper name for the metal piece). My old gear was cracked so it was easy to slide it off. I simply pressed the new one using padded jaws in a vice on as seen below: https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...98a5629afc.jpg I put the new gears in, lubricated them, and bolted the motor back together: https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlis...c65e063093.jpg From here reassembly is just the reverse, please look at step 7 in the first post on how to adjust the upper travel limit. References: Bross-Auto-Parts, Gears: https://www.brossautoparts.net/index...ry&path=66_430 Door Panel Removal: Door Panel Removal: Door Panel Removal: Overall the project took a couple of hours and shouldn't be that difficult if you take your time and are careful. There may be better ways to do this, just sharing my experience. |
Worked for me with some mods
Thank you so much for this write up. It saved me $900 at the local independent Porsche shop who was going to replace the whole motor. The process took a bit longer for me so I'd thought I'd share my challenges and solutions in hopes someone else can shave a couple of hours off their journey and a ton of scrapes, bruises and frustration. The door has two panels as described in the previous post. The first is the outer door panel which is easy enough to remove after you watch the videos on YouTube. The second is the inner panel, that for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to disassemble from the actual door. It seems there's screws holding it in place from the back side, where the retainer bracket that holds the top of the sun screen motor is located. Once I realized this was going to be a job where I'm going to have to feel around with my hand and figure out which two screws to unscrew, it was pretty straightforward.
I used a small ratchet with a torx bit attached to fully remove ONE of the two screws holding the retaining bracket in place. I then backed out the second screw just enough to move the bracket out of the way and left it hanging in place. Once the bracket is out of the way, the entire motor assembly slides right down and out of the door panel. When you go back to reinstall it, having the retaining bracket hanging in place makes reattaching the screw MUCH EASIER since you're basically working in the dark. Simply reposition the bracket over the motor shaft, find the screw hole and tighten everything back down. Yes, it's a pain in the rear since it such tight quarters and you're working backwards but I kept reminding myself how much I was saving by simply replacing a $9 piece of plastic as opposed to buying a whole new motor. The second issue that caused the real frustration was actually removing the sun shade from the metal rod. I don't know if others have the same experience but the rod is very tightly attached to the top of the screen, as well as down in the motor (especially at the top of the screen). There was no real good way to release it. In my case, I didn't have a release clip on the top of the screen when the rod is inserted. Instead, the rod simply has a groove cut into it and that groove allows a metal clip attached to the inside of the screen housing and down in the motor to basically clip it in place. Just imagine an e-style circlip. That's exactly what mine looked like. In my case, I was able to pull up on the screen which released the rod from the motor. Then I pulled it all up and out along with the whole outer door panel. The screen is attached to the outer panel so that comes out in one piece. However, for the life of me, I could't manually release the rod from the screen until I finally attached a vice grip to the rod and firmly (not hard) struck the vise grip with a small hammer. This impact released it immediately (it only took me two hours and a lot of heartache to figure that one out!). I had a friend hold the door panel as I struck the vise grip so we'd avoid causing any scratches to the panel. When reassembling, I attached the motor to the door panel, reattached the door panel with the sun screen, pushed the rod down into the motor through the top of the door panel, and made sure it clicked into place. If both the top and the bottom of the rod are not affixed properly on either end, the sun screen will still work but it will not retract into the door panel all the way. Just make sure its all fitted properly and you'll be fine. Hopefully this is helpful to someone tackling the project on their own. It was a bit of a pain but so fulfilling every time the screen go up and down now. Coincidentally, the passenger side broke last week and from start to finish, I was able to perform a complete rebuilding by replacing both gears in less than an hour. Good luck. |
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