Since I bought 4245 in late summer of 2012, it was plain that there was something wrong with the power windows. The drivers side would only go down haltingly and only go up with a lot of help by pulling on the glass itself. The passenger side was marginally better.

About the time I decided I would have to do something with it, issue #161 of the Avanti Owners Association magazine arrived at my door, with an excellent article on how to remove the windows, window regulator and get (almost) everything back in good order again. I say “almost” everything as a critical part of my problem (and easy to fix while you’re in there) was not covered in this article, which is what I’ll focus on here.

After removing the window regulator mechanism and window per the parts manual and following along with the aforementioned article, I noticed that window motors themselves seemed to be rather “gunked up” with old grease. I then removed the motors from the mechanisms (watch that winder spring!) and removed the cover that goes over the gears on the motor itself.

The gears appeared to  be in fairly good shape, but there were literally hundreds of small shards of plastic mixed in with the grease.  A bit of judicious searching on the web identified these shredded pieces as having been “impact absorbers” (for lack of a better term) nested inside the gear housing that, as I understand it,  act to soften the impact as the gears moved back and forth while going up and down.

Through more web searching, I was able to identify a replacement for just the gears and these little absorbers. This part crossed over to a number of different cars from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. I was able to obtain it from RockAuto under Cardone Part #8294 for $12.47.

Since I already had the window motors apart, replacement was easy – cleaning out the old grease and making sure I got each little bit of the former gears out was time-consuming, but not difficult. Occasionally I used some toothpicks to get into tight places.

Re-assembly was straightforward, and now the windows with this fix along with the rest of the maintenance performed as described in the AOAI article including cleaning and lubricating the tracks, regulators and replacing the outer wipe seal have made a phenomenal difference in how the windows perform. Up and down quickly, quietly and smoothly!