You will need to pull off the door panel. See my notes on the door handle repair for this:
If you enjoy photos, this writeup is good and has photos. Once the panel is off, the next job is to pull (and rip) the plastic sheeting out of the way, doing your best not to rip it. It is old and brittle, so this is a challenge.Remove two 10mm bolts holding the window to the regulator. To gain access to the front bolt you will need to crank the window about 1/4 of the way up so it lines up with an access hole in the sheet metal. It was no big crisis to remove these bolts, the window just sits loose on the regulator, but you now need to lift it up and prop it somehow in order to remove the regulator. I used a stick through one of the holes in the sheet metal to accomplish this.
Now remove six 10mm bolts holding the regulator and motor. There is no question about which these are as there are only six such bolts on the door. Now the mechanism drops to the bottom of the door frame. A cable to the motor needs to be disconnected. The only sensible way I found to do this was to remove the speaker (5 phillips screws) which gives easy access to the connector.
You should now have the mechanism sitting on your workbench. What is wrong? To disconnect the motor from the regulator will require a T-25 Torx driver, not something everyone will have, but easy enough to go buy. I had a set with every bit known to man and it included one of these. And actually the three screws would also allow a flat blade screwdriver to be used, so suit yourself. After decoupling the motor, there still is nothing obviously wrong. So taking the motor off was a waste of time. The motor includes some kind of gearbox and my guess is that the problem is in there.
The motor is labeled "Toyota 85720-35040 062100-6252 Denso".
I used RockAuto and ordered an AISIN front left motor and regulator assembly. List price $57, but it will cost $70 with tax and shipping include and should be here in a week.
This will be continued once the part arrives. And it arrived on schedule, 6 days (4 business days) from being ordered.
Reassembly is much faster, no doubt about it.
Tom's Tacoma pages / tom@mmto.org