SteveJamieson.com

Some time ago, the power door lock on the rear passenger door of my car broke. For some reason or another, it was only working intermittently, which isn’t a very good thing for a lock to be doing. Although I almost never use that door, it unlocks with the rest when I use my remote, and I count on it locking in order to keep unauthorized people out of my car. Investigating the issue, I followed some instructions I found online to take the door panel off. Nothing looked jammed, and since the other three locks were working just fine, I figured it was just a bad motor. I wasn’t about to deal with it just then, so I packaged up the door parts, chucked the door panel in the back seat, unplugged the motor, manually locked the door, and shut it.

The offending motor/lock

Now, having a mechanic fix the motor would have been an expensive proposition. The motor (actually the whole locking mechanism) costs about $70, and then there’s the ever expensive labor costs. Since I already had the door panel off, and could see that it looked like a relatively simple procedure to swap the lock out, I figured I probably could do it myself. When I went home back in the fall, I borrowed some Torx bits to get the lock out, which proved to be a rather straightforward task as I suspected. After having a mechanic confirm that it was indeed the motor that needed to be replaced, my Mom and Step-Dad picked up a lock from a junkyard for me (about $20 or so), which I brought back to St. Louis after Christmas.

Then last weekend, having come across relatively mild weather and having been recruited to pick up some kids for church, I went to work. I hooked the new lock up to the appropriate wire and hit the nearest power lock switch. It worked. Knowing that I had a functional lock in my possession, I removed the old one and replaced it with the new one. Having hooked up the power cable and all the connecting rods, I tried the power lock switch again. Again it worked, locking when I told it to lock and unlocking when I told it to unlock.

Now with my functional lock in place, I had to get the door panel back on. Unfortunately, most of the fasteners that hold the door panel had stayed on the door when I had removed the door panel, and I couldn’t yank them out with pliers without breaking them (and even then they still remained in the door, only broken). The shop manual that I had received for Christmas had a diagram showing this cool little crowbar-type device made specifically for removing the fasteners. Realizing that acquiring this device would be the key to successful reattachment of the door panel, I put all my stuff in the back seat and drove off to the auto parts store where I purchased said device. Upon returning to the apartment, I applied my new tool to the job, and it popped those fasteners out with ease.

The fastener removal tool

As the first drops of an approaching rain cloud fell, I slid the fasteners into the holding grooves on the door panel. After aligning the door panel on the door, I gave it a few good slaps, which popped the fasteners back into the holes from whence they had just been removed, and thus the door panel was reattached. As the rain began falling harder, I climbed into the back seat, shutting the door behind me, and I inserted the two door panel screws. Finally, after consulting with my Step-Dad over the phone, I snapped the window crank back into place, and completed the job.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2004 at 11:40 PM and is filed under Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.