I had a slight problem working on my Nova one day, but I made it into a very positive thing!  The drivers door has been to hell and back.  It was sagging due to bad bushings, and a drunk idiot who was a friend of a painter who worked briefly here decided to "adjust it" for me.  He took a 2x4 board, put it under the door and pried it up! He bent the bottom edge of the door, plus crumbled out the rest of the door bushings.  I replaced the pins and bushings, but the window was in a severe bind.  It took probably 25 or 30 ft pounds of torque to roll it up or down
  So I decided to fix it for good.  I took it apart and found the door had cracked in 2 places (25 years of slamming...) and also was missing a few screws.  Fixed that by welding it but still the window was in a bind.  No track or regulator (window mechanism) adjustment would fix it.  Then I was rolling it up and stripped out the gears in the window regulator!  They are tiny and not made for 30 pounds of torque!!  The large "sector gear" was now missing several teeth.  I had to "help" the window past this particular spot but eventually I discovered the window track was bent in (due to the 2x4 prying incident) and after straightening it the window was free of the bind!  But the gears were still bad.
  I took the window regulator out of the door and examined it.  It is a dual-scissor type thing with a massive counterweight spring and a big "half gear" at the pivot point, and the handle gears turn this big half-gear to move the window.  I have lots of junk BMW parts so I started looking through the parts bin.  A BMW window regulator is strikingly similar.  I couldn't find any sector gears with similar teeth to work with my handle gear, and the BMW handle gears are not adaptable.  Plus all these old ones I have use a Bosch electric motor to drive them.  AHA! Screw using a handle, I'll adapt an electric motor to this system!  So I cut apart my regulator, and removed its (stripped) sector gear.  Then welded the BMW sector gear into its place.Went on to drill out the rivets from the handle shaft mechanism and ground it away completely.  Finally I drilled mounting holes for the Bosch gear motor that drives the mechanism.  Add a few washers between the motor and regulator body to align the gears and it was ready to go!   Repeat for passenger's door...
  I have 3 junk 5-series BMW's each with 4 motors.  I could afford to use two of the 12 old window motors!  Believe it or not, they work far better in this car than they do in the BMW they came from.  The GM regulator has a counterweight spring to help the motor lift the window.  I've seen a 70's GM car with power windows, and they didn't operate nearly as quietly or fast as mine do!  I'm very happy how these turned out, now all I have to go is install switches. 
The switches are in the wooden console my father built. I needed a place to mount some extra gaugesm anbd to hide electronic parts. There's not much room in the dash of these older cars! The two red rocker switches to the left are the driver's and passenger's window switches.  I may have one of the few power window Novas because I don't think they were offered with power windows in 1972 except for the very expensive "concourse" edition. 
The second picture shows the installed window mechanism from in the car with the door panel taken off. The irregular shaped hole to the right of the pinion gear is where I ground off the original crank handle shaft mechanism.