How to Prolong the Life of Your Toyota Sienna Sliding Door Cables

How to Prolong the Life of Your Toyota Sienna Sliding Door Cables
How to Prolong the Life of Your Toyota Sienna Sliding Door Cables

The sliding door cables on the right door of our 2004 Toyota Sienna broke last winter, as seen in the image below, and I wanted to see if I could put off another repair and prolong the life of your Toyota sienna sliding door cables.

Broken sliding door cable hanging from my van

UPDATE: I must confess that I do not think that this tip prolonged the life of my cables.  After a few months this sliding door cable frayed and I was forced to cut the cables off in order to get the door closed.  On a positive side, I have now replaced both sliding door cables and have combined all the pictures and lessons I’ve learned into a step-by-step tutorial on how to do the repair yourself and you can view it here (the only step-by-step tutorial for this repair on the internet):

How to Prolong the Life of Your Toyota Sienna Sliding Door Cables

I looked into the cost of having a dealer do the repair and it is over $1,000.  I purchased the part and repaired it myself.  You can see my step-by-step instructions for the replacement of your sliding door cables here.  I’d like to prevent or at least prolong the life of my existing cable.  I believe this can be done by understanding the way the cables typically fail:

  1. the plastic shielding wears off the cable
  2. the wire cable rusts
  3. the cables begin to fray
  4. the cable snaps

Our left door has the plastic shielding worn off but the cable has not frayed and is still in tact and I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible.  So, in order to hold back the rust, and therefore the failure of the cable, I’ve decided to oil the cable to give it some resistance to rust.  I have some 3-in-1 oil that should work fine:

Good old 3-In-One oil

The cable lays tightly in the plastic channel below the rear window and is easily accessed as shown below:

Location of rear sliding door cable as it lays in the sliding door channel below the rear window

I ran a drizzle of the oil all along the exposed braided cable so that the cable soaked up the oil, giving it some resistance to the elements:

Sliding door cable oiled to protect from rust

You’ll want to wipe up any excess oil on the plastic.  I’m going to keep an eye on it and add more oil after a month or so to keep the cable coated and see how many more miles we can get out of this cable 🙂  Why repair it if you can prolong its life?

Update June 16, 2014:
Well, the prolonging didn’t last long.  I posted this about 2 months ago and this past weekend the cable frayed and the door would not shut anymore and I was forced to cut the cables.  I guess I’ll be writing up another repair.

All My Toyota Sienna Posts:

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4 Comments

  • John,
    You’re impressive! Hit it right on the head; my window was down and works just fine with the window up.

    Also, wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your instructions on replacing the sliding door cable assembly. I’m in my 80’s and not very nimble anymore, but with your excellent instructions I was able to accomplish this rather complicated task with no problems. It took me quite a bit longer than some of your “clients.” Day and a half. 🙁 But I kept checking on my iPad a lot to make sure I didn’t make any huge mistakes. But now it works perfectly. Thanks again for your explicit instructions and photos. I would never have attempted this without them.

  • Right sliding door will not latch open. If I trip a small “lever” on the bottom assemly, it will latch open once and then same lever blocks it short of full open the next cycle. Any answers?

    Thank you.

    • Ezra, when you were trying this was the sliding door window down? When the window is down it behaves exactly like you describe. I was very puzzled about it just like you until I took my door apart and saw the switch that was engaged when the window is down. It must be some safety feature.

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