Our 19' Escape was only a week old when I hooked the front passenger window on the yard gate latch bringing it out for a weekend.
Fortunately, only the outer window broke, leaving the inner pane intact. So we could just duct tape around the outer edge, and it held up fine in highway traffic, and we could still go camping.
Raece was extremely helpful, and sourced a replacement window for us on short order (from his own stock!), and got it to us lickity split. The basic idea he had was to try to avoid a frame swap, to simplify the window replacement process.
Now HEHR contracts out the work to build the window frames, and they have two contractors. One uses rivets to hold everything together. Another uses screws. This would've been a heck of a lot easier with the screw type - ours is riveted.
The old hinge came right off - just lift it to 90 degrees, and lift it vertically off the hinge.
The windows are held on by that hinge on the top, and the landing legs on the bottom. Two rivets in the window-side of the hinge sit in slots in the frame-side, and keep the window from sliding forward or back. It has to be lifted to 90 degrees to come up off the hinge.
So Raece helped us carefully measure the distance between the rivets (and therefore slots) to ensure they match another window. When we received the new window, we compared side by side to ensure the rivets line up - they didn't, as it turns out. Ours are about 1/8" off to one side. Basically, the outer glass pane is glued onto the hinge and stuck onto the frame holding the inner glass pane, so those two can be out of alignment on different windows. This hinge is to the left of the frame, that one to the right...depends on the guy gluing the set together. If you get a window where the hinge and frame are way out of alignment, the window won't mate inside the frame properly, it'll stick.
At any rate, here's the process;
Step 1: Remove the knob on the old window, it just screws out and the knob pulls straight out.
Step 2: On the knob mounting bracket of the OLD WINDOW, drill off the heads of the rivets left and right. We do this on the old window first, because if we mess up, we have the whole new window we can do a full frame swap in. We used a 3/16" bit (matching the rivet diameter) and used the slowest drill speed, just barely digging metal off the rivets until the head turned. Lift the rivet head off, then open the landing legs (put the knob back on if it's helpful) and remove the old inner window pane, frame, legs, bracket, and all. You'll have to lift up and deflect the bracket over the lip of the old window frame to clear.
Once the rivet heads are drilled off, push the rivets forward through the frame, being careful to avoid bending the frame. We used a brass punch and a wooden block supporting the frame. Note that the rivet may be distorted, and won't fit perfectly back through the frame; I found a few squeezes with pliers, or encouragement with the brass punch sideways made it fit a lot better.
Step 3: Repeat the process on the new window.
Step 4: Strip off the caulk that lays above the hinge on the old frame. This caulk makes it impossible to seat the new window onto the old frame's hinge; it pushes too hard. Later, we'll replace this with standard clear (matching) silicone caulk. To save yourself some effort, just clear the area behind the hinge so the new window can fit back there.
Step 5: Place the top hinge of the new window into the slot of the mating hinge on the old frame - lining up the two locator rivets on the hinge. Then close. You have to lift up on the landing legs and deflect them a little to get the mounting bracket to go over the frame.
That's as far as we've gotten right now. Ostensibly now all we have to do is put new rivets through the old frame and new mounting bracket. However, our duct taping appears to have put some rips in the outer weather stripping, and I think the inner weather stripping may have gotten crushed by the impact with the garden gate latch. So while it opens and closes fine, the weather seals don't seem to mate up perfect. So we're gong to try and source some weather stripping, and make a final call before putting new rivets in and sealing the deal.
Best scenario, we fix the weather stripping how we like, put the new rivets into the frame, put some touch up black paint on the new rivets (or source black rivets), and clean up our duct tape stickum, and we're done.
Worst case, we can put the new window back on the new frame and put rivets back in, and do a full frame swap instead. We're pretty close tho, and it's looking promising. It's hard to find matching weather stripping tho.
Anyway, if HEHR would just formalize this process, it seems like this would be one heck of an easier way to replace broken windows!