Depends on how hard you want to work at it.Yesterday was too nice to sit in the office and knowing that the rain was about to begin again, yes it is doing it now, I took the day off to determine if the advice on this forum was good, bad or just foggy. Many said yes, but it had been a while since they did a swap.
I should re-read my question and the discussion because I think we concentrated on exchanging the rubber gaskets and what I really wanted to do was change out both the wing windows and the gaskets.
When I had my windshield replaced last summer the guy there told me he never had success with gluing the original hinges back to the windows and getting them to stay. Just to much torque and weird mounting surfaces. He said go find those bolt on type windows and I would be glad I did.
Well last week I purchased two doors just for the windows alone. I was able to remove the drivers side window and entire frame out of the door and brought it back home with me. I then took the one out of the Rabbit and started looking them over.
Just to prove and show the process I started with removing the Rabbit window out of it's spot. Note the hinges, flat and chrome.
And the donor door. Anyone need to Cabby doors?
Once I had the windows out side by side I noted no differences in size. Height, width and curvature, all the same. Only differences were the handles and the bolt holes.
I did note that the gaskets were pretty much the same and only the opening where the upper hinge came through to the window was just a wee bit wider than the original one. So those would be a direct swap.
The real problem is the channel that goes up and down the inside of the door and holds the main window in place is way different.
The Cabby is larger than the earlier Rabbit
The means of keeping the track in at the top is different and so are the spacings for the metal bracket that goes around the front of the wing window and holds the rubber gasket.
I figured I was out of luck on this one. I didn't want to remove the metal channels and have to rivet them in new places. But that is how the upper hinge attaches and that is needed to make this work. So I started to investigate just removing and reattaching that hinge. Woooo hooo a direct swap again.
I drilled the rivets off each and reattached the needed hinge to the old frame.
I was then able to slip the donor gaskets on the original frame and not have to change any of that hardware. It slid in with just a few pokes of a thin screw driver guiding the gaskets to where they needed to be. Then I popped in a new rivet at the bottom of the channel and installed the wing window.
See all done, and yes they do work.
I took all kinds of pictures on this so if you need to see more let me know and I will add if I can answer the question better that way.
Thanks for all the advice on this. I didn't think I was going to see success on this when I was checking out the frames but with a sharp drill and mind I got it to go.
Now to take on the other side.
As for the chrome strips around the windows, I used my originals guys. I didn't bring the Cabby because it doesn't curve at the end and is too long. Getting them off is easy but not so putting them back on. And getting the gasket into that slot is kind of a pain in the thumbs, made it work with a small flat screwdriver it can be done, just takes time.
So I got my goal complete. Wing windows that don't leak and more importantly that they open and close properly.
Yeee Hawww.