Hooray for spring and the opportunities I have to work on cars!
Today I pulled the door card out of the Scirocco again so I could fix the door latch, again. Here's the background:
When I bought the car, neither of the door latches worked very well. In particular, one of them had disconnected from the interior lock tab and could only ever be locked or unlocked from the outside. This was sometimes inconvenient, but not as often as you'd imagine.
So, I pulled the door apart one day to find that the plastic piece that connects the interior lock tab to the latch mechanism had failed. I ended up wiring it back together again with a whole bunch of telephone wire (fantastic stuff for working in small spaces, by the way) and bingo, it worked. I fixed this when I bought the car, around April or May of 2003.
Ever since the beginning of this school year (~September 2004), the driver's side latch has been sticking. My original thought was that my telephone wire hack was starting to fall apart and that I'd need to reassemble or rework it. I figured this was probably the case because the passenger latch was still working fine because it had the original working tabs in it.
Taking the door card out seemed more difficult than I remembered and, in particular, I had no idea how to disconnect the wing mirror controller. This was somewhat odd—I don't tend to forget things like this.
Once I got the card off, I figured out what had happened: it turns out that I had originally fixed the passenger door (which, I'll remind you, is still working fantastically). Even funnier, it turns out that the driver's side lock had failed in the past in exaclty the same manner as the passenger side, and that the previous owned had hacked it with a similar, but much less effective, solution. Instead of telephone wire, he used an oversized ziptie; this doesn't work very well when trying to bind a 1/8" rod to a piece of plastic which is, at its widest point, 1/2" across.
Anyway, I haven't actually fixed the door because it started raining and I wasn't planning on pulling the latch out today anyway. I can drive the car with the door card off, but not with the latch detached. And since the Camry still has the marker lamp hanging out (because I haven't painted those dents yet), then I have to drive the Scirocco.
Ahwell. Here's a picture of the doorcard.
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