pishta

OK, so your interior door handle broke, or doesnt open the door. Maybe its your exterior handle..or worse: its your lock mechanism that stopped working and now you cant get your door OPEN to remove the door panel to fix. Your up S.C. with out a paddle? Well, I was this morning. My kid hit the power lock from the inside when I was trying to get in the driver door and something must have happened because my door lock wouldnt unlock the door and neither handle would open it. That makes getting the interior panel off pretty tough to fix the lock cable, eh? Well, Ill try and tell you what I did to get the door open.
First thing I did was to remove the passenger door to see the workings of the lock cable. I looked in there and everything is behind a plastic shield, that makes it a little tough to pop. But I did see something, but I still had to get to the driver panel off or open enough to get my hand down there to manipulate a rod. I reclined the seat as far as possible and removed the armrest screw and interior door handle screw, then I moved the seat forward and got the rear armwrest screw. I gently pulled down on the rear upper corner of the panel and pulled it from under the sill cover. I was able to pull it out far enough to get my arm down into the inner door, careful where the wood trim meets the door handle, I broke the fiberboard there. OK, so now you have a little room to work. There is a plastic shield that covers the door latch mechanism: on the outboard side of the window track, there is a rod that comes down from the outside door handle: right next to that inboard about 3 mm there is a metal pin behind a horizontal slot opening that is as high as the little slot you can see it though. If you manipulate the door handle, you can see the cable pushes a bellcrank that hangs over this pin down, pushing that pin straight down. that is the pin that pops the latch mechanism. The lock simply moves the 'push' piece off the pin so when its locked, the handles still push the piece down, but it sidesteps the pin, no contact. Unlock and the piece moves over the pin so when you manipulate the handle it pushes down on this pin and pops the door.
SO you need to push that pin down with a screwdriver. It is easier with the lock in the lock position so as not to have anything over it. You need to push the flat blade of the screwdriver into the slot where the pin is visible and try to get on top of it. It pushes down about 3/4 inch so you need to use a stubby so you can pry it down with a minimal arc as you dont have much room in there. I didnt have a stubby but I did have a small jewelers screwdriver with a sharp flat tip. I eventually was able to push the pin down by inserting the small screwdriver in at a 45 angle and pushing against the pin hard and down. The door finally popped and I could then remove the panel to see what went wrong.
Turns out I didnt even need to pop the panel as there was nothing visible wrong in there: No hanging rods, no broken clips...nothing except the lock mechanism wasnt snapping into position either locked or unlocked. So I manually cycled the lock back and forth to its extremes in a firm fashion (I was pissed! ) and on the 4th cycle, the limp lock started to snap again in either position. Sure enough, the "pusher" was now cycling again behind the plastic shield: Over the pin (unlocked) and side stepping the lock (locked). I threw up my hands and shook my head and put both doors back together, but not before testing the door latch about 10 times using a screwdriver to push the doorlatch in to simulate the door shutting. Worked every time. So its all back together, handles work, ended up with 1 extra screw and misplaced the handle bolt cover but Im stoked that I was able to get the door working again. Crawling over that center console is tough!