So I had the idea of repairing the dead front speaker in the driver door the other day. It was one of those situations where if you squeezed the rubber tube that holds all the wires between the body and the door, the speaker would sometimes work. I spliced some new wire into the damaged parts of the speaker wires, got the speaker working again and was happy until I realized that now neither the power window nor the vertical controls on the side mirror worked. I must have jostled them enough to screw up the connections.

Seems to me that a simple approach would be to replace the whole harness that serves the door lock, window and speaker. I haven't been able to find one new. There are some 850s in the local u-pull-it lot, but I worry I'd just be replacing one 15-year old batch of faulty wiring with another. I suppose splicing new wire into each connection is a possibility, but it seems like a lot of monkeying around.

Anybody out there feel like they've dealt with this in a sensible way?

 

From what I have seen over the past couple of years I have not heard of anyone else having the same problem. I would get the wires from the yard and replace it. You'll likely be fine. Make sure that your wires are not being bent in the closed door.

 

Sooner or later they all break. It used to be more frequent as i remember cutting a bunch of those open and then pulling off the door panel and splicing in new wire. Those were 70s and early 80s but I haven't seen one in a while. Maybe they are using better wire.
If you can't get a harness from the dealer you are pretty much stuck with getting a used one and hoping it's in good shape.
If you wanted to do a great job you could grab one from a salvage yard, disect it one wire at a time, install new wire to the connectors using the old one for a guide and then swap it in. Then if you really wanted to be crazy you could save the bad one and re do it to put in the other side.
It's a matter of your cars condition and how long you expect to have it.

 

Okay, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but it may help out someone else in the same situation somewhere down the pike. For whatever reasons, as noted above, my speaker wires were dead. I pulled back the rubber boot, cut them out and spliced in some new wire, which fixed that problem. But then, as I mentioned, the window and mirror stopped working. The trouble wasn't that I jostled the wires and they snapped. Really it was that I didn't get the harness from the door completely seated within the connection coming from the body. I finally thought to unplug it, made sure it was in there firmly, screwed down the plastic nut that holds everything together, and voila!, I was back in business.

So, a dopey, self-inflicted problem, but at least it didn't cost anything to set it back to right.

 

Thanks for getting back with us. I know people that have had 850's with 400,000+ miles on them without a door wire harnest problem so I just didn't think it was something that people had to deal with often. Glad you're back in shape.

 

A little extra time but at least you did fix the original problem you went in there for ! ! !