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'98 Corolla CE Manual to Power Door swap

6K views 5 replies 6 participants last post by  336Racer 
I converted my 01

On a difficulty scale from 1 to 10, this one ranks about an 7, and requires some knowledge on how to trace and figure out the pinouts of wiring harnesses, wire in relays, etc. If you're unsure about wiring at all, this is not a job you will want to undertake...

The CE's are NOT prewired for them unfortunately, so you have your work cut out for you.

I got all 4 power doors off a donor car in a junk yard, doors that were basically being parted out because they were dented and rusted. All you need is the guts, everything will bolt into your manual door shells, so the colors of the doors don't matter. All you're after are the power regulators (you can use your original windows if you choose; I used the ones from the donor doors because they were tinted and my originals were not), the power latches, the power mirror if you wish to converter them as well, and the complete door wiring harness from where it plugs in at the kick panels and everything inside the door.

The inside the car wiring is the difficult extraction... You have to pull the dash in order to get the harness out complete. And once you do extract it, you'll end up with a TON of wiring that you don't need for the conversion, so you have to deloom the harness and pull out just the wiring you need, which as you can guess is SUPER time consuming and a bit of a pain in the arse... But if you spend the time to do this, you'll end up with a complete harness that you can basically drop in. You will NOT need to pull your dash to install the harness luckily, there's room to fish the wires in and run them up in the dash by hand.

Don't forget to grab the mirror adjustment switch from a donor car if you're swapping over power mirrors too.

The only thing you will have to do is provide 12+ constant, a pair of relays for the lock/unlock functions (this usually is handled by a module under the dash, but I didn't grab said module so I had to improvise...), everything else is basically plug and play.

I stared with getting the interior wiring in place and functional, testing along the way just by plugging in the door harnesses and plugging in the regulators and latches and switches and making sure everything worked for every door before even digging into the doors. I was driving the car every day so I didn't want to have it half torn apart in the process lol

Then it's just a matter of gutting doors and swapping in the power components and plugging everything in. It's a time consuming process, but if you take you're time it'll look and function just like factory in the end. I went as far as installing an aftermarket keyless entry system into mine when it was all said and done, just to modernize it a little more :)
 
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