Glove box door soft open broken / flopping open fix (1 Viewer)

[bloc]

Hello all,

On a recent roadtrip my glove box suddenly stopped soft opening. No real stress applied, just one time it went thunk and bounced a few times. When I got back into town I started digging in and was able to come up with something that may help some people.

So what controls our glove box opening is a really cool pneumatic/coil spring damper, connected with a thin high-strength rope that appears to have a Kevlar core.

I'm assuming if you need to do this job you already know how to get the glove box assembly out.. this requires pulling the door sill trim, passenger knee pad and silver trim, passenger knee airbag, then the box assembly comes out.

This is what you are faced with. Note that you absolutely should not hang the airbag by the yellow wire.. it’s hard to see but it is propped up on the right side above some bolts at the base of the a-pillar.

The gray tube with the rope is the damper, and clearly it is disconnected from the door. At first I thought it was tied somehow with maybe a figure 8, but I tried doing this and it was too short.. and broke the rope out of the damper completely. The silver lining here is I realized the small brass clip I found on top of the passenger kick panel was actually to hold the rope. So I got to repairing the whole thing.

Damper on the bench with the rope pulled out.

 

[bloc]

This is the damper assembly disassembled. The white bushing/plug comes out by depressing two small tabs.. be careful doing this as they seem easy to break by going too far then the damper spring may push the bushing out in the future.

This is the plug/piston the rope attaches to, you can see the o-ring and grease. This seals tightly inside the damper, and on the other end a small rubber diaphragm means a slight vacuum is pulled which is what controls the speed of the door opening.

Rope pulled out of the piston, showing the brass clips toyota uses.

Diaphragm on the other end. You don't need to open this to do the repair but I was curious.

 

[bloc]

So what toyota uses here is the method I've adopted for most of my electrical work.. brass open-barrel crimps. You need a special crimper for these, and they are very size specific, but this is what toyota and basically every auto manufacturer uses from the factory and when done correctly is better than soldering wire. But here, it is perfect to tightly hold a small rope.

Open-barrel crimp in the crimper. Sorry for potato-quality.. still trying to figure out getting focus on macro with this phone.

After piston-end repair. Note the yellow core which is probably Kevlar. Go toyota!

Threaded through the piston and spring, ready to go back in before closing the other end of the rope.

Assembled damper

Damper screwed back in place with the door-end push pin back through the loop. This shows how extended the rope is when the door hits the stop, which is separate from the damper.

 

[bloc]

As usual, any questions or suggestions let me know. Hopefully this fault is rare and many people don't need the writeup!

 

[Zill]

Great tech, Bloc! Appreciate the write-up.

 

[Karbon]

That is a really interesting mechanism that I wasn't expecting at all. That engineer must have spent a lot of time playing with water blaster tubes as a kid.