1997 Dodge Ram 3500 Truck Front Driver Side Power Window Switch TRQ SWA41548

Hey friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500 and I want to show you something fairly basic, removing and reinstalling the driver's side window switch. It should be fairly easy. I can do it and you can do it too, and as always, if you need any parts, you can check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so we've got a couple of Phillips head screws, one here and one here. We'll take those out. We've got our two screws. They're both the same. This right here to move around now. That's nice. Cool. All right. We've got another screw up here. Get that out of there. It looks the same as the other two. Nothing special. Set all three of those aside. Now, this door panel, we're just going to feel around, make sure that there's no more screws. Sometimes you'll feel a couple coming along the bottom there. This does not feel like it has any, so we're doing all right. We have a couple of plastic trim tools. The reason why we're using plastic is because we're going to be going up against the paint and if you're worried about your paint, then of course you don't want to scratch it up with metal. Let's come right in here like this. We're just going to go right along.

Okay, we'll lift this up. As you go you're going to just kind of jam it towards the forward position or I guess towards the front of the vehicle. There we are and that's just because on the backside of this, you've got all these little clips and they go inside these hooky-doos and these things, I don't know why Dodge did it, but they've got some, so you need to slide straight up and down, you got some that you need to slide forward and back, whatever. I'm sure they had their reasons, but anyway, we've got this almost off now. So now what we're going to do is we're going to get the wiring off of the back here. So the next thing we're going to want to do is disconnect. This right here. There's a little tab. You can usually grab it with your thumb. If you can't, a small pocket screwdriver, just grab it, pull it away. Give this top area a little wiggle. It should want to slide right out. Awesome.

So right here there's a little tab. Can you use your thumb if you want, try to push it. Just be careful for a pinch. I'm going to use this. I'm just going to push right here. That lets this come up. Now if we come this side, we can lift right up on this. Awesome. I'm just going to go right like this, see if I can get it to go down and through. This is great. Now we can get our door panel right out of the way. Keep on plugging away.

Okay, so what we're going to do, we're going to take our pocket screwdriver. You can see right here, right there, and then the same thing on the other side, here and there, there's little locks. The screwdriver is going to come in handy because we're just going to come in from an angle. We're going to lift up right there. Okay? Do this one. Same thing. Try to get in towards the center, looks like we need to go a little bit more. There it is. Awesome. We'll slide this up and it pops right out. Awesome. Let's move along.

So here we go. Got our window switch. I'm just going to lift up on this tab right here and lift up on this tab right here and there we are. Here's our window switch. Awesome.

Okay, so now what we're going to want to do, take a look at your electrical connections. Just make sure you don't have any funny colors in there. If you do, you can get a terminal brush. We sell those at 1AAuto.com and you can clean those out. They'll come out great. If for some reason it's something that you can't clean out and it's just garbage, well you're just going to have to get a new one of these and then splice it in. Okay?

You can see that where the prongs are, they're not a perfectly straight line. They kind of go at like a little bit of a curve and that's great because on the back of the switch, the prongs do the same thing. You know why they did that? So in case you are doing something and you mixed it up, you can't put it in the wrong way. It won't line up. So we're just going to line up those prongs. That looks great. I'm going to give it a little squeeze. That's nice. Give it a nice tug just to make sure it's not going to fall out. Last thing you want, is it coming apart on you. I'd say that looks really awesome. Let's continue on to the next step.

So let's just get our switch in here and grab this, give it a little squeeze. That's nice. Give it a push. That feels good. Awesome. All right, so it's going to be time to get the door panel on here. Before we go out and do that we're going to take out all these push pins. All right, and we're going to put them right into the door panel and then we'll put the door panel in and the push pins will hold it to the door. To do that, you're going to use something simple as this, it's a little forky tool, just like that. Give it a little twist, whatever you got to do to get these puppies to pull out. They make them nice and long for you. That's what they look like. They've got like a little ear there and that's where it's going to slide over the door panel and then these little ears right here are what hold into this hole. We'll take all these out and we can continue.

So these little tabs, the push pins, you've got that area right there that I showed you before. It just slides right in. Okay? Bonk. There we are. Do the same for all of them and then we can continue.

Okay friends, let's get this door panel on. I'm going to take the electrical connector or the electrical harness here, try to bring it up and through. This can be a little tricky sometimes. Try to get out of the way. Just give it a, you know. There it is. Just have to be a little forceful with it sometimes. That's okay. We've got our electrical connector right here for our mirror switch. We're going to plug that in. You can tell which way it goes because it has this little nub right here and that lines up with the nub in there. Slide it in, give it a tug. I hope we don't pull the whole thing right off the door though. Get that back on there. Cool. All right.

Let's bring this up. What we're going to pay attention to now is the door handle. I'm just going to try to pull the door handle through its hole. Slide this over. Awesome. We've got our lock. Just take the lock, just bring it right through the hole. Awesome. Bring the door panel down, get it so all of our little pushpin/pitons are going to be lined up with our holes. Once you get a couple of them started in, generally speaking, all the rest will be lined up. The hardest ones for me to see are the top ones but it is important to get them lined up, down along our side here. Same thing along this side. Just line up as many of them as you can get before you start bonking them in. There's one in the center here that is lined up but not going in. There it is. Oh yeah.

You just want to make sure that your door lock can flow up and down easily. If it can't, this could be wedged a little bit. Maybe the bar got bent in some of the process that you were doing. If that's the case, well, you're just going to have to pop this back out of the way and see what you can do about bending it because you want this to make sure that it can go up and down. That looks really great. I would say we can continue.

So now we're going to take our long screw and we're going to go right up in here. Just try to find the hole real quick and then I'll get out of the way. There it is. Okay. We don't need it to be too tight. We don't want to break the plastic or anything. We just needed to pull this right up against. That looks pretty great. We can move along. Grab our switch here, it's just going to slide in. Let's take a look at it. It goes in the backside first and then the front side. Bonk, bonk. Very nice. We're going to grab our little cup with our two mounting screws. We've got it facing the right way. You've you got your holes. You can see where it goes right down into the door. Phillips head. We'll start that one in. Start this one again. Okay. We're just going to bring it all the way down. That's snug. Awesome.

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