[DML] My car won't let me in.

["Payne" <bpayne@xxxx>]

First of all, I want to thank everyone who gave me suggestions about my
disfunctional E-brake. I had the technician mess around with it some more
and it now holds fairly well. The only thing that worries me is it holds
when you pull the handle up only a few centimeters so it may be dragging all
the time.

But now I have an even more frustrating problem. My driver's door has been
giving me a lot of trouble lately. I replaced the door seal with a new one
from PJ Grady's and now the door is extremely hard to close and open. The
seal is on as far as it will go but it fits too snugly against the door when
I close it. My other problem with the door is that when I close it, it will
rarely let me open it again. The latch mechanism is getting really banged
up and the white plastic has cracked. I've tried every possible combination
of adjusting the front and rear striker pins. Some positions make it
slightly better and others won't allow me to open the door from the outside
at all. Also, every time I close the door it pushes on the drivers side
lock rod just enough so I can't open it again without holding the key in the
unlock position and pulling hard on the handle.

There's a couple of things I want to try, but I have a couple of questions
before I attempt it. I'm the king of doing stupid things so I need to be
careful. The rear striker pin seems to be sticking too far out (toward
front of car) as it has different washers behind it than the front one. If
I unscrew the striker pin all the way and pull it out to remove a washer,
will I be dropping anything that it is attached to into some unholy abyss in
the rear quarter panel? Also, the door handle is an aftermarket one that
doesn't quite match the passenger side. This handle doesn't seem to have
enough pull on the mechanism and I was wondering how I can adjust this. I
have the upper trim panel removed but I can't seem to get a wrench on it and
I don't quite know what I'm doing.

Okay, this has gotten longer that I'd hoped. If anyone has any advice to
keep me from doing anything stupid I would really appreciate it. I still
love my car!

payne
#2975