Yep Paul, I dealt with the same problem on a friend's car. Apparently the passenger side torsion bar had cracked where the hex/allen key goes in the end. The more torque applied to the allen key, the more the torsion bar would spread open locking it into the plate. What aggravated this is that the previous mechanic didn't seat the bar all the way forward which caused the square end of the bar to deform (twist) because it wasn't all the way in the hinge. That bar was so over-torqued that the door would stay open about 1/3 of the way with no strut. I remember reading someone's procedure for finding proper torque, and they said it was to have the door stay open no more than 4 inches off the door sill. I disagree. This is way too much. I say that if the torsion bar raises the door off the sill any then that is too much and your strut isn't strong enough. We finally removed the plate by prying it off with big flat crowbars. It was kind of scary because one wrong move could break the rear window. Once we got the bar out, the spline end was twisted and cone shaped. Twisted because it was way over-torqued and cone shaped because the end had fractured. The cracks seemed to spiral around the end so it made them really hard to recognize as cracks. With the bar out of the car, we tried putting the retaining plate back on, but the spline area was now too fat for it to fit. I got some small files and spent about an hour cleaning up the splines. Then using a hammer I was able to tap the retaining plate on short distances at a time until I made it fit like new. It looked like it was going to work until we put torque on the bar. The hex key spread the end of the bar open fat enough that the retaining plate wouldn't fit. We could never get a good look at the cracks, but obviously they were there. There was just no practical way to reuse that bar. BTW, the proper allen size is 3/8 inch. If you mistakenly used the next larger metric size AND the end was fractured, this could stop the end from compressing enough to get the plate off. So okay, I'll eat my words about the jig idea being no good. Using one would give you more room to fit prybars under the retaining plate. Want a copy? Walt Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT <http://rd.yahoo.com/M=194081.3897168.5135684.1261774/D=egroupweb/S=170512 6215:HM/A=1706996/R=0/SIG=11p5b9ris/*http://www.ediets.com/start.cfm?code= 30509&media=atkins> click here <http://us.adserver.yahoo.com/l?M=194081.3897168.5135684.1261774/D=egroupm ail/S=:HM/A=1706996/rand=288765468> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: DMCForum-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> .
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