Good morning all, so yesterdays job was to change the rusted out 2008 tailgate and replace it with a 2005 year one that has no rust. Having trawled through the internet, Utube and forums, I decided that the easiest way to do it, was to call in a favour or "two" to be exact....one of my friends works for a automotive glass franchise, so i asked him to remove the screen on the rusty tailgate so as to expose the wiring looms then i could unpick the loom from the clips that hold the loom in place and feed it out through the holes in the tailgate. once the screen was out this proved to be a fairly easy affair. there are 3 push in clips (that the loom is in, down the drivers side of the screen, this is a UK car), and 2 clips in the roof of the screen (again drivers side, these weren't push in clips, these were taped to the loom and had to be pulled out and the wiring undone from them).

There was a second benefit from taking the screen out and replacing it, my original screen had " privacy glass" the donor screen had a green tint to it, so it would have looked completely different.
I had looked at soldering all the wires together, and sorting the canbus wiring out, but because of the different manufacturing dates and different specs of the cars, my 2008 loom had more wires in it than the donor tailgate wiring loom. So all in all it seemed a long winded way of doing it, but proved to be time saving and kept most things original so hopefully no issues when all the electrics are connected.

Some little pointers to anyone thinking of doing this, having watched my friend take the screen out, and listened to him. He was concerned that there might have been locator pins in the windscreen from when put in at the factory, there wasn't. All he was concerned about was catching the loom with the cutting wire, to avoid this, in the corners we inserted my plastic trim remover tool to lift the wiring out of the way , and no damage was done to the wiring. He broke through the bonded seal half way up the screen on the drivers side and started from there since it offered the best access to the mastic. He said afterwards with a little time and patience i could have done this, if id have had the right tools, or bought them off ebay, there was nothing to be worried about attempting this myself, should anyone else want to go down this route.

if anyone has any questions feel free to ask me and i will answer them as best i can, and i hope this helps some one else.

regards
Tiprat.