Nissan Skyline R34 Window Fix
In 2018 I imported a car from Japan. As you probably have guessed from the title of this blog, I did indeed import a Skyline. Why? Well I wanted one of these cars since I was 9 years old and I made it happen, that’s why! Anyway, back to what this blog is actually about — 3D printing.
So after 4 months on a boat and many hours starting at a shipping map to see where it is, my Skyline arrived in the UK. Sadly while on its trip across the world a tiny bit of plastic broke which in turn meant the driver’s side window no longer functioned properly; how on earth am I supposed to drive a car in the summer with no ability to open the window? The image below shows the exact bit of plastic on the guide rail.
Now I spent a good 3 or 4 hours looking for this part on the internet. Trawled through many old Skyline forums and reached parts of the web that no man or woman should ever have to go. This part simply does not exist… Instead, Nissan’s official stance on the matter is to buy the entire window slide and motor from their heritage site for over 250 GBP. Now in a world where we should be recycling or reusing as much as possible, this just isn’t acceptable!
Fast forward to over 9000 hours spent in paint and I had a design! Well before I get to the design, I did spend about 4 hours getting the window and the mechanised system out of the car while slicing my hand up multiple times on sharp bits of metal, but we’ll forget about that for now. My design was simple enough but I knew nothing about CAD or using a 3D printer, so I consulted my brother who guided me through the steps. A few months later and we had my design in CAD, ready for printing!
Now as you can probably tell, this part looks nothing like the original. Why? Well, the truth is we went through 3 different designs that all failed. You see the original part was put in place during the manufacturing process which I assume was done by a robot. It was never designed to be replaced at all. The design my brother and I settled on actually got around a lot of the design choices made by Nissan when they put their unit together. We figured out that if we bent the bit of metal at the end of the rail down (Green), we could fit this 3D printed piece in and around the metal nub (Purple), stick a bunch of grease on it and then push it fully into the rail. Once the metal end bit was bent back into position, we were then able to put the entire mechanism back into the car and test it.
Now the crazy thing about doing this is other than the sheer amount of hours put into this project for learning, I was actually able to fix the part for less than 10 GBP. The best bit is this piece has been in my car since 2018 and is still working perfectly fine! It doesn’t squeak or rub, there’s no noticeable difference between the windows and even if it did break, I have the peace of mind knowing that I can just print a new one in 20 minutes!
Moving forward I actually want to put this design out there so that others aren’t forced to pay crazy prices for second-hand parts or having to go through Nissan’s heritage business for something that can easily be fixed with this design. Hopefully this will stop you from having to spend a silly amount of money to replace the entire unit when you can just replace this single tiny bit of plastic.
The design is now for sale!
Head over to cults3d: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/universal-window-slider
