Convertible top motors, How to fix. with pictures! Options

[MaskedMan]

Ok so i've been meaning to post this for awhile now, but haven't had the chance till now. Well i've heard a lot of people having problems with thier convertible top opening and closing. And usually the motor is still good, except there is a part inside that is broken. What happened with mine was that one of the sides stopped working and my convertible top needed assistance opening and closing. But the motor was still good, cause it still made noise when i pressed the button. The problem was a pin inside. So if you are having this problem, and your motor still sounds good, then try this, and it may solve your problem...

First you'll need to remove your convertible top motor from which ever side isn't working properly. So first remove the bottom part of the seats, they just pop right out, they are held in by two clips in the front. Then you will need to remove the rear plastic panel on the side your trying to get to. Don't worry bout the seat belts, you can leave those attached, cause you just need to get the panel out of the way. After those are out of your way, You should be able to see the convertible top motors. They are held in by 4 10mm bolts, but you will also need to remove the rear speakers and cut a zip tie before you can unplug the wiring clip and remove the motor. After you remove the motor, you will need to take off 4 hex bolts connecting the motor to a black box that has gears in it. After you take that apart, it should look like this...



Now we can take a look at the problem. There is supposed to be a pin that keeps the gear moving when the motor moves. When this pin breaks, the motor will just keep spinning, but it has nothing left to turn the gear. This pin seems to break off since it happened to both of my motors. Im guessing its like a fail safe device or something, if there's too much stress put on the motor is just breaks the pin, so you dont burn out the motor? Thats my guess. Or maybe the pins just suck. Well anyways, it needed to be replaced. Here's a picture of the Motor with the broken pin removed...



Here's a picture of what was left of the pin...



Here's where your gunna need to improvise cuase i couldn't find a part number for the pin. I ended up cutting drill bits in half and using the solid end as the pin, whatever get's it done right? haha Im guessing you could use any pin as long as it fits in the hole pretty snug. I hope this helps

This post has been edited by MaskedMan: Aug 4, 2006 - 11:56 PM

[Markup]

I wonder if I can get someone who may have carried out this fix on the power hood to look at the below images and give an opinion on (in my case) exactly what job the pin does. I notice that my central shaft protrudes out from the centre of the gear wheel further than it does on MaskedMan's but I am not sure if that is an action that happend when voltage is put through the motor or not.

Also, there appears to be a kind of collar around the central shaft of MaskedMan's which is not on mine.

I dont know either if the pin is supposed to be the same length as the diameter of the central shaft or if it's supposed to protrude out of each side by a certain length ...any help or advice here would be greatly appreciated because after struggling to get the pin out which was broken in the hole, I am just not sure what its function is, perhaps if I could understand that I could approach the problem better but I am pretty well stumped at the moment.

These are the images I have taken:

This is an image of what the gear end of MaskedMan's motor looked like...



This is an image of what the gear end of My motor looks like...



This is an image of my motor placed near the scrteen showing a comparison and the differet appearance of the two



thanking you in advance,
Mark