Ray: Well, since you're driving an '03 Voyager and have demonstrated an impressive lack of urgency about this - living without a roll-down driver's window for three years rather than pay a mechanic to look at it - I'm going to guess you don't want to invest a lot of money in solving this puzzle. So start with the easiest approach to failing electrical equipment: Whack it.
Sometimes, when an electrical switch or motor is failing, tapping on it or giving it a jolt can bring it back to life - albeit temporarily. But everything related to an ’03 Voyager should be viewed as temporary.
Assuming you’ve checked the circuit breaker in the driver’s foot well and it’s good, start with the window switch itself.
Try poking at the driver’s window switch more forcefully than you normally do. If the contacts for the window switch itself are rusting or coming apart, sometimes a little extra force can get them to work again for a while - sometimes a long while. If you can get the window to work by stabbing your finger on the switch, that tells you that the switch is your problem.
Then you have two options: You can live with it, and try to revive it when you need to, which leads to SIFS: stubby-index-finger syndrome (which is what you’ll probably do). Or you can replace the switch (which is what I’d do).
If you can’t get the window to work by being more vigorous with the switch, the next thing you can try to test is the window motor. That’s inside the door. The easiest way to test it, without investing time or money, is to give it a Judge Judy: Gavel it.
While an assistant is holding down the window switch, close your fist and give the middle to lower half of the door some quick, sharp blows with the bottom of your fist. Try it from the inside first, and then from the outside. Obviously, don’t use so much force that you dent the car. Or your hand.
If the motor is failing, a jolt like that often will get it to start working again, at least temporarily. But more importantly, it’ll tell you that the motor probably is the culprit here. Then you can either replace it (which is what I’d do), or go to the gym and do fist exercises (which is what you’ll do).
If you can’t get the window to respond to those tests, then you may have to resort to actual diagnostic methods. Start by removing the window switch and using a test light to see if it’s getting power.
If there’s no power getting to the switch, the next thing I’d suspect is a broken, or almost broken, wire in that bundle of wires that runs through the driver’s door pillar and into the door. Those wires connect to things like the window switches, the door-locking switches and the side-view mirror adjusters. After opening and closing that door 500,000 times (that’s the door that gets used the most), it’s certainly possible that one of those wires is frayed or partially broken.
If there is power to the switch when you test it, then that suggests that the motor is bad. Then you’ll need to remove the interior door panel, if you haven’t already broken it by banging on it, and confirm that power is getting to the motor - which it probably is.
Once the motor is exposed, you can try the Judge Judy again, this time tapping it directly with the end of a screwdriver or some such thing. Or you can just replace it.
And whatever your diagnosis, you can look for parts at a junkyard. These cars were plentiful, which means rusted-out ones are now plentiful in the nation’s junkyards. Just be sure to park a block away so you don’t come back to find other shoppers eagerly pulling parts off your car.
The causes of overheating are many
Dear Car Talk:
What causes radiators to overheat?
- Andrea
Ray:
Why do I suspect this is not just a theoretical question, Andrea?
If you literally mean “radiators,” what causes them to overheat is corrosion.
Over time, especially in parts of the country where they salt the roads, the fins that make up the exterior of the radiator can corrode. Those fins are responsible for dissipating the heat that the coolant carries through the tubes in the radiator. And if they’re all corroded, they can no longer do their job, and the heat stays in the radiator.
A radiator also can fail due to internal corrosion. If rust builds up inside the tubes that carry coolant, those tubes can get blocked up. And if the coolant can’t move through the tubes in the radiator, it can’t get cooled off.
So that’s the radiator itself. If you’re really asking me what causes engines to overheat, there are a variety of things.
The simplest is a thermostat that’s stuck closed and doesn’t allow the coolant to flow to the radiator. The next simplest is a leak, in which you lose a bunch of coolant and don’t have enough to carry the heat out of the engine.
The most expensive issues are the ones that allow the super-hot gases from the combustion chamber to get into the water jacket, where the coolant flows. Those can include a blown head gasket, a cracked head or a cracked block - all of which my brother suffered from during his lifetime. As did many of his cars.
And every one of these issues is exacerbated, of course, by, what? Heat! If it’s 110 degrees out, and you’re driving up a mountain, any small problem is going to become a big problem. Good luck, Andrea.
Visit Car Talk at www.cartalk.com.
About the Author