Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I Have Something Nice To Say About Larry Miller Pontiac in Boise

My son's 2005 Pontiac Sunfire, while still under factory warranty, developed a problem with the driver's side power window motor--it just stopped working. Larry Miller Pontiac fixed it under warranty.

Well, a year and a half later, it developed the same symptoms. GM charges $180 for the motor, and the labor was quoted at about $140. Hmmm. Can we replace this ourselves?

Trying to find a repair manual that covers this recent of a Pontiac was impossible. I mentioned the problem a while back, and one of my readers scanned and emailed me the 2005 Pontiac Sunfire door wiring diagram, and the 2000 Pontiac Sunfire remove and replace instructions. She wasn't having any luck, either, on finding the 2005 instructions.

So I opened up the door. Just in case you get really bored:

1. Unscrew the sheet metal screw that holds the driver's side mirror control in place.

2. Unscrew about five sheet metal screws that hold the driver's door panel at bottom and rear to the door.

3. Unscrew two 6mm bolts that hold the door handle part of the door panel to the door.

Once inside, my wife immediately noticed that the plastic sheeting that is supposed to provide water protection for the motor and other mechanisms had a big orange rust stain where the motor is. It also appears that GM's notion of proper sealing would only work in the Atacama Desert. The clear plastic sheet is attached to the door by some black goo--and not enough of that.

A little experimentation with a multimeter, fiddling with the power window switch, and listening to everything, confirmed that the motor was intermittently bad. The window regulator itself (the gear and scissor-lever arrangement that moves the window up and down) seemed to work just fine.

But the more I looked at what was involved in removing that motor--since I couldn't see the far side of the mechanism without fiber optics or shrinking myself down to one inch tall--I decided to go to Larry Miller Pontiac.

They couldn't do anything about the bad motor--out of parts warranty--but they were willing to install the $55 motor that I bought online. It was clearly an exact replacement, and they did the labor for $122. I suspect because I made an issue of it, they probably did a better job of sealing up the plastic sheet.

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