Through rain and snow and sleet and hail

Yay, more painting fun. I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about this.

I got started around 10am, because it's the weekend and I can be a lazy ass sometimes. Anyway, it was partly cloudy (around 5/8 coverage¹) but I figured I had enough time to mask the car, paint, and pull everything before the wind really picked up.

Right after I had laid down the first few sprays of paint, it started raining. I hadn't really expected it to rain.

Somewhat unfortunately, my garage is full of shit³. After seeing that I couldn't pull the car in forward enough to get it out of the rain, I spun it around (covered almost entirely in plastic wrap, by the way) and backed it under the awning.

I did have to sand down all the botched primer and remask a few spots, but it's all good now. I suspect the unexpected shower cost me around an hour.

Later, I hit the Scirocco and its busted, busted locks.

Here's what you're looking at:

• The big rectanguloid thing near the bottom is the main body of the lock, although here it's unbolted and facing downward. Usually, the slot (which is facing mostly downward) would be pointing in the direction that the door closes: to the right.
  
• The two holes just above the lock are for the exterior handle/lock (left hole) and the interior lock (right hole). The interior handle is holding the lock body onto the door through another hole.
  
• The white tab is where all this mess occurs. It actuates the interior lock arm—the white bit slides onto the arm, which is on the back of the lock body. The white arm is also connected to the interior lock knob, which can be seen as a black button-looking thing just next to the window.
  

The problem here is that the part that connects the white arm to the interior lock knob wire (below) has broken.

Here you can see these two parts attached as they would be in the door. The knob screws onto the threaded top of the wire, and the whole white plastic thing slips over the end of the locking arm. As you can possibly tell in the picture, there's not much holding the wire to the plastic bit. There should be another plastic arm just above the point where they connect, but it's since broken off. This failure has occured identically in both doors. Great design, Volkswagen.

The last owner repaired it with a big fattie zip tie. This was much too large to 1) really fit into the hole⁴, and 2) hold everything together adequately.

I've replaced with some telephone wire, which has worked fine on the other door so far. I'd post a picture, but it's really about what you'd expect. There's a shot in the gallery if you're really that interested.

This seemed to work fine, but the lock body managed to jam itself⁵ and I couldn't get it all back together before the light quit.

I did manage to pull the handle off, so that warrants Yet Another Picture. Wooo.

¹ Eighths² are usually used to describe the extent of cloudiness for any given viewable sky for any given time. There will be a quiz on this later.
² Let's get crazy with the metric system!
³ This shit has been in there for 171 days.
⁴ I actually had to cut the tie off while the whole mess was still inside the door. Fun.
⁵ Note that men often change the verb subject in a sentence or shift entirely to a passive voice to avoid blame. "The doorknob is broken," "my truck is crashed," and, "the lock body managed to jam itself" are all examples of men trying to make it look like they're not as idiotic as they actually are.