Electric Windows Need Strong Juice

I think my forty year-old truck is at a sort of midlife crisis point. I'm not sure if it's more mileage-related or time-related, but it seems everything rubber is nearing catastrophic failure. Everything I've found so far. Exhaust hangers, motor mounts, hoses, and now door/window soft goods.

I've been working lately on installing an upgrade to the electric windows. It involves adding relays that allow a solid, full battery voltage to be delivered to the window motors directly through heavy wires. The factory setup used good-sized wiring between the window motor and switch, but the 12v delivery wire is only 16-gauge. Woefully undersized. The driver's side of these trucks usually don't work too bad, but the passenger side is almost always slow, dragging--almost painfully slow at times.

I could have done the whole thing from scratch by buying a couple spools of wire, 4 relays, and 2 inline fuses, and then following online schematics, but nah--I bought the kit from LMC Truck. Why reinvent the wheel? Besides, I don't always have residual brain power to toss around on any given day. The wiring isn't much of a problem--the real challenge with this install revolves around fishing wires through hard-to-get-to places. I would recommend anyone that does this upgrade not be keyed up or uncomfortable in any way on whatever day you might decide to do it. It's an exercise in patience. 

I pondered this little project a long time before finally coming up with a battle plan. Likely due to door hinge placement, the factory chose to offset the holes between where the rubber conduit for the door wiring is attached to the door jamb, and the place on the inner kick panel where the wiring comes through. Whatever the reason, it makes the whole upgrade a little challenging.

I chose to drill 5/16" holes for the hot and ground wires to do the pass-through in the kick panel areas, directly in-line with the rubber boot. It was still a bit of a wire-fishing job, but wasn't too bad. I ended up cutting a length of baling mechanic's wire, fashioned a small loop at one end (to aid in getting through the rubber boot), and added a length of shrink tubing over the winding. You don't really want it too long or you won't be able to twist it very well to help it through the boot:

I found it worked best (for me) to start at the kick panel end of the wire run and go backwards through the boot towards the door. When the loop came through into the door well, I bared about 1" off each wire, stuck it through the loop (and wound it tightly), and push/pulled (guided gently) back through the holes. After pulling both the wires back through the new holes I put rubber grommets in. 

When it comes time to run wires from side to side through the dashboard, there's only one way to really do it right, and that is to take the dash cover off. Sure, you can hang wires and tuck them up from the bottom, but I found it much better to take things apart and attach my new wires to the existing run of factory wiring. When you get to this point things can look pretty scary inside:

After running wires across the cab, I needed a place to run them through the firewall. I opted to drill out one of the dimpled holes I found down near the fuse block. They're easily seen from the engine side if you know where to look, but you can't drill from that side. I popped the insulation plug (seen at the bottom) out and drilled from the inside:

I added a wire bundle clamp (or whatever you call them) to the backside of the parking brake unit to run wires through. They needed somewhere to route safely so they didn't get mashed in the brake mechanism. I don't want them near anything that might get them severed accidentally. Here's what things looked like at this point:

After running wires through the firewall I had to decide where I was going to park the relays themselves before I cut the fuse pigtails apart. The kit came with fuse pigtails partially complete, but I didn't care for the way it was done. They had the fuse connector already mounted on the end of the main power wire (yes, the long one), and expect the users to 'click' them together when they run the wires. In other words, they want you to use the power wire as is, without cutting it. That didn't set well with me, so I clipped the end off and installed it onto the fuse pigtail (seen below) so I could cut the 'loop' anywhere I decided I needed it to be cut.

The two included fuses are made to be ganged together, and did so nicely. To mount them I drilled a couple slots in the fuse block plastic to run a zip tie through, and used a one of those zip ties with the built-in mounting hole. (Note: Any areas with heat-shrink tubing are areas I have soldered and made permanent.) I mounted the fuses near the left front corner so I could use the power junction block I installed for my oogah horn. After connections were all soldered I crammed all the new wires into the existing wire sheathing. It didn't come out too bad.

Epilogue:

The windows work great. Was it an amazing difference? Not really, but it was noticeable. It's really hard to gauge it accurately because both window motors were already there and their condition is unknown. I also replaced both window felts all the way around at the same time, so drag was probably changed. Overall, the windows feel more "instant" if nothing else. There is no lag when you hit the buttons. Also, it doesn't pay to cut corners with switches. The brand new driver's side switch fails to roll the passenger side window up. Down works fine, but not up. I swapped the worn-out OEM one back in for now. At least it works. I'll stick to ACDelco or something similar next time instead of getting them from LMC Truck.