how i fixed my car using a stick and some duct tape

About 2 or 3 years ago, the front electric window on the passenger side of my car stopped working. Being a cheapass who doesn’t take stuff in to be fixed until she knows what the problem is, I took off the door panel and had a look. The window goes up and down thanks to a motor which winds and unwinds metal cables kinda like those used on bike brakes. The one that made the window go up had obviously snagged on something and had sheared through. So I switched the cables round, figuring i’d rather have a window that goes up and not down than the other way round. It stayed in place for a while, but over time gravity had its wicked way and the window slid further and further down, the tension in the cable just wasn’t enough to hold it. I occasionally got pissed off with it and tried to tape it to the door frame so stop it falling down, but that rarely fixed it for more than a week or so.

Then last week, the driver side window started doing the same thing. Today, in a fit of ‘OMG NEED TO DO SOMETHING NAO’ I decided we should fix it, and made Gren stop playing WoW to come and help me. After getting the panel off, we discovered that it was the same problem as before, one of the cables had sheared through, though this time not as cleanly and there were probably bits of cable in the motor too, but it still goes bzzzzzzzz when you press the button so maybe not. At this point i started to lose interest in the whole thing. Diagnosing and fixing problems with stuff is awesome if there’s an actual way to fix it, otherwise it’s just boring. Eventually we got some sticks wrapped in felt (for padding) and duct tape (to make them thick enough) and rammed them into the runners and used a bit more duct tape just to be sure. At least the stupid window won’t fall down again. hopefully. Then we had to do the same thing on the other side, and I was getting more and more bored, but after doing the first side I realised it was pretty much a one-person job, so I just stood around and flailed and whined a bit while gren did most of the work on the passenger door. score.

The most annoying thing is, all it needs is a new bit of magic metal cable, but, according to some guy in the pub who i kinda know and who works as a mechanic and said he looked it up, you can’t just buy the stupid bit of metal that obviously breaks ALL the time seeing as it broke on BOTH my windows. You have to buy the whole extra motor and all the other bits that i don’t even need and it probably costs like a million pounds. If I still lived in London I’d probably make the effort to check out some salvage yards (mostly because omg i LOVE salvage yards, they have so much cool STUFF in them), but I don’t think Norwich is sufficiently advanced to have such areas of awesome, or if it is, i dont know where they are. So instead i will just have to sit in my sweltering hot car with both front windows up and sob gently to myself about the unfairness of it all.

BUT!

when it rains we won’t get soaked any more, and the wind won’t go ‘wooooooooooooo wwwwweeeeeee’ in a really annoying way when you drive more than 30. so in my book that counts as at least a partial fix. so yeah, I FIXED MY CAR USING DUCT TAPE (and some bits of a stick i found on the floor)