I was trying to put my elec antenna in today, but decided to test it without remembering to stick the silver nut thing on top, so when the aerial turned on, it pushed the whole aerial out. Now I cant get rope (white thing) back into the motor. I opened it up and manually put some of the rope on the gear, but when I turn on the radio it pushes out the rope.... Because the rope isnt new, its curved and I cant get it into the motor without opening the motor case and doing it manually...

How can I make the motor suck in the rope instead of pushing it out first?


I can see so many threads about buying new rope's, but none about actually installing them....?

The workshop manual trick says to poke the rope down (with radio already turned on), with the rack facing inwards - towards the boot.

You may have to try straightening the rack by bending the other way a bit - I have had this work well, and other times seemed to do not much good, but you can only try. The main trick I found was try to straighten the very end of the rope - say last 15cm - seems to help when trying to get it to mate with the gear-drive in the motor.

When you get a fair bit of the rack down, and think you can feel the rack hitting the gear, turn the rope so that rack faces the back of the car, and try to negotiate just a bit more rope down as well (just trying to make the rack mesh with the gear).

At this point you get "your lovely assistant" to turn off the radio - with any luck the radio will trigger the antenna motor to retract the rope, and with further luck you will have the gear meshed with the rope and the rope will be wound back..... in which case you just have to juggle a retracting rope and get the bottom of the mast mated in the hole as the rope retracts.

In my experience, the radio-on/radio-off sequence always takes several goes - I never seem to get the rack meshed into the gear first go. If you fail first time, probably best to lift your rope slightly (end of rope away from gear-drive) turn radio back on and let the radio trigger the motor to extend the mast. Then when motor has stopped running, try to feed the rope down (rack towards boot), twist rack to face rear of car, jiggle/dance/pray, then radio OFF again and hope it meshes. I think its just luck of the draw where the motor stops and if the gear is likely to mesh with the rack, curly rack is a pain (but the new ones are also a pain - as was the new one which for no apparent reason only lasted about 12 months!).

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If you really can't feed the rope down, and need to manually open the motor - you would need to load the rope into the motor with the radio ON, then turn radio OFF to trigger the motor to retract the mast IN-wards.

Good luck.

I did this a few months ago when the old rope broke.

But putting the new one in wasn't a prob. Like has been said, turn the radio on, poke it in. If it's too curved, wind it back the other way around a post or something to help straighten it. Turn the radio off and it will suck it back in, job done.

Ok thanks guys, had to pull the thing apart around 25times as it would stop winding when the aerial was still half way up, dont know what I did, but it seems to work now...