Door handle trigger replacement - garbage
 

Recently, my passenger side door handle trigger broke, so I ordered the replacement part from Pelican (PEL-TMP-TRIG-C). I replaced the guts and installed it, and found I was unable to lock the door, either by key or by the pull thingy on the inside. The trigger worked, but felt different - I didn't need to squeeze the trigger all the way for the door to open, and it felt tight, as if, if I squeezed too hard it would break. Finally today I got a chance to take it apart again and finally discover what wasn't working.

Turns out it's not the installation, it's the part itself. The spring-loaded pin is simply too long. That explains the shorter squeeze travel to open the door, and also explains the inability to lock the door. The mechanism used to lock and unlock the door is the same piece as the mechanism used to open the door. When the trigger is squeezed, the piece is push towards the interior of the car and that unlatches the door to open it. When the key is turned in the lock, it moves the mechanism left and right - left is locked, right is unlocked.

When you unlock it, the mechanism moves to the left, at which time the pin (being spring-loaded) is able to push past the part of the mechanism that it would normall push on to unlock the door, thereby blocking its path travelling back to the right when you try to lock it.

So I took it all apart, and noticed that the replacement pin is adjustable - there's a stop on the end, where the pin is threaded. So I shorted it as much as possible, however then the stop is unable to sit in the seat, as the end of the pin sticks out too far, and in fact in this position the trigger is unable to move at all, thereby rendering itself useless.

Luckily, the part I broke originally (and as I understand it, the normal part to break) which is the shaft that the pin is inserted into, is perfectly fine on the replacement part. So you can reuse the original trigger, pin, spring and the new upright piece to put the pin through, and all will be well.

Still, it'd be nice if the entire part worked fine - would make the job much easier.

BTW, for those reading in the future, you can't repair the upright piece that breaks - I tried to JB weld it and it didn't hold at all.

Sorry no pictures, I wish I took some of all the parts while I had it apart, but by the time it was back in the car to test, I was running out of time, so I just put it all back together. If I can, I'll see if I can dig up some pics of the parts around here to illustrate what I'm talking about.

It's good you found a solution.

As you know as our cars get older the door locks become problematic. Recently I fixed my daughters Nissan passenger door lock. It wouldn't open unless you pushed the door in after raising the lever from the outside. It turned out to be a small adjustment so no parts were changed. But it was a pain to get to the mechanism and had to install the lock several times to get a feel of what was wrong.

I always find it interesting to see the difference between various manufactures.

I had a Mercedes years ago that had the most exquisite door locks. I just loved that big cone shaped pin that pre aligned the door lock as you closed it. It was well designed and robust... I never had an issue with any of the door locks in that car and I owned it for over 15 years.

Before that I had an Alfa Romero that "developed" an auto opening rear door as your turned to the right... I had to buy a brand new door lock to fix the problem from an Alfa dealer. I couldn't believe how expensive it was. The old one almost fell apart in my hands as I tried to clean and oil it. All of the plates were loose and the contact points were severely worn. I was surprised because the car was only about 5 years old at the time. I'm guessing the steel was softer than it should have been in that particular lock.

My Porsche door lock experience has been a good one. The locks are an old design but they're robust and for the most part reliable. Maybe not as good as my old Mercedes but still pretty good. And certainly much better than the Alpha.

Oh no you didn't spell it that way!

(It's Alfa Romeo).

Oops... That's the spell check in my browser. :(

All fixed.

At least there is a replacement part now. A number of years ago when the drivers side door trigger on my Carrera broke, I had to buy an entire new door latch assembly. It was expensive.

It's only useful as a replacement if you break the right part.

I bought a new lock assembly, and right off the bat notice it was very, very cheap. Most of it was made of plastic. the OE part was all steel. I ended up only changing the broken part at the end, transferred the lock pieces to the old lock, and voila, fixed.