My WTF Moment of the Day

Two days ago my driver side (left) window started going stupid in my Saturn. I disassembled the door to find the gears that the window motor turns were totally shot. So yesterday I was able to find one at a junk yard. Today I took the door apart again today to replace the broken one. Now, I will pause my story here to backtrack to yesterday, for some needed details of the reason I consider this to be a WTF moment. The window motor assembly that I removed off of the parts car yesterday was apparently a newer model than my car. The whole assembly was held in by 4 11mm bolts. Remove those, and you have a window motor sitting on the ground, pretty simple concept. Coming back to today, I start to remove the assembly in the same order as the previous, and what do you know, the whole assembly is riveted into the door. If you don't know, rivets are used to hold things that are not made to be removed. What genious at Saturn would think to permanently attach a part that is commonly removed? WTF were you thinking GM? I understand in the world of making cars someone has to get stuck with making rental car quality cars. But rivets? You guys must have been ripping people off to make money for a while, and you still couldn't get that right. I can imagine it now, "oh yeah, you're gonna have to let one of our technicians take care of that for you"... I spent 40 additional minutes beating the crap out of my door just to get this thing off. Later I install the new (new to me at least) assembly the "right" way the nuts and bolts. Saturn must have also swapped the signal locations on the assembly on the later model cars also, because now I have to pull the window up for the window to go down, and push the button down for the window to go up. I really hate when stupid stuff like this happens, it takes away from the time and money I could be using on my S14...

1 comment:

  1. Great story! I definitly have to agree with you, that was very ridiculous car manufacturing on GM part! But, at least you were able to fix it! Plus, that really proves why you should drive a Nissan!lol! So far the work on the back looks GREAT! Hopefully you will be able to get the car painted before it gets too cool. I'm always willing to help if you need some extra hands! Keep up the good work and I'm excited to see what's next after the paint job?!

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