It seems the front passenger door on my 12-plate Octavia will no longer unlock at all.  No amount of jiggling about with the handles, repeatedly unlocking the doors (whilst revving the engine) or anything like that has made any difference.  All the other electrical stuff routed through the door works (window, speakers, wing mirror) so I have spent today grovelling upside down in the footwell and finally managed to remove the door card in an attempt to try to get at the motor and open the door.  My back may never be the same again.

 

So this is where I am for now.  Any advice on how to proceed at this point would be much appreciated.  Fortunately I have about six weeks before the MOT is due.

 

 

James

Well, I've got a little further, and yet I haven't...

 

Watching lots of videos online suggested that there's a plastic cam at the top inner side of the lock mechanism that prevents the door release lever from moving and opening the door, and that all I needed to do was to push that plastic cam up and out of the way.  Once pushed far enough it appears that there's a spring that will hold it in position.  Having carefully drilled a couple of holes in the  door frame where they will be covered by the door card, and after quite some time poking about with screwdrivers, I have done just that.

 

It makes naff-all difference.  The door remains resolutely closed.

 

I was hoping that working through a couple of extra holes in the door would mean I don't have to drill out all the rivets in the inner door skin nor faff about with the electric window.  It's not immediately clear to me if it's possible to disconnect the wiring connector for the lock mechanism before removing the inner door skin either.  I think I've reached the point where it has to come off though.  I can't see any other way forward at this point that doesn't involve buying a replacement door and taking an angle grinder to the existing one😄

 

James

A month on, I'm still stuck with this though to be fair I haven't had a lot of time to play with it.

 

According to the online workshop manuals, the first step to removing the inner metal door liner is to remove the "straddling dowel" that holds the window in place in the raise/lower mechanism.  To do that I apparently need to screw a 5mm bolt into the adjusting pin and remove it.  Well, I've screwed a 5mm bolt into the adjusting pin and it doesn't feel like it's going to budge without applying quite a lot of force and I'm not really happy about doing that without knowing what the adjusting pin is made of and if I'm likely to damage it.

 

Any ideas on this?

 

James

Ah, well, I decided I'd just get medieval on its donkey anyhow: slipped some washers of increasing diameters onto a 5mm bolt, screwed it in and pulled hard using the washers for leverage.  The adjusting pins popped out.  They're basically a hard plastic dowel with the ends chamfered on the outside.

 

Next step is apparently to do the same to remove the straddling dowels using an 8mm bolt.  Only an 8mm bolt isn't large enough and just pulls straight out again.  How we laughed!  It's getting too dark to see what I'm doing properly now and since my stash of old hardware doesn't appear to include such a thing as a bolt with a 9mm thread anyhow, tomorrow I shall try slipping a bolt with a 7.5mm-ish head down inside the dowels so it drops down behind the back edge, then try to pull them out with that.

 

James

Progress this morning is that I now have the dowels removed, the window taped closed and the steel door liner removed.   The dowels came out quite easily in the end using the above procedure with the threaded end of the bolt held in mole grips.

 

Most of the door liner retaining rivets i could drill out, but the two below the speaker I had to grind off with the Dremel.  It's very tempting to replace them with hex head self tappers when it comes to reassembling the door.  What I haven't been able to do so far is to remove the wiring loom connector from the lock mechanism because I can't work out how to unclip it.  I know there's a clip on one side, but I can't see it or feel it.

 

At this point it doesn't look like there's much more that I can do other than destroy the existing lock to get the mechanism to release, so I'm off to order a replacement from that ebay.

 

James

Hi @JamezF

 

Keep me updated as at some point I will be dissembling the drivers door.

 

23 hours ago, JamezF said:

According to the online workshop manuals

 

Do you have the link to this manual you can share.

 

Thanks,

Kev.

No problem.  It is a whole lot easier if you're able to open the door, I suspect.

 

The manual I'm using is here.

 

James

My replacement door lock arrived and I've finally got to the point where I can fit it.  I thought I'd test it first, so I plugged it in to the wiring harness.  When I operated the locks, nothing happened 😡

 

I am concerned this might mean there's an electrical problem elsewhere which could be a nightmare to find.

 

Anyone know if any of the other door electrics have any effect on the operation of the lock?  I'm wondering if I should reconnect all the electrics to the inner door skin and see if that makes any difference before hiding in the corner of the workshop and bursting into floods of tears 😆

 

James

I'm surprised that nobody suggested it earlier on, it looks like your problem is the frequent one of broken or fractured wires in the door loop bellows, most likely the drivers door.

Might as well check the driver's door I guess.  I can't get the passenger door open, after all 😆

 

James

Can't see any obvious damage to the cables in the driver's side, though I did find a small fragment of glass inside the rubber.  I guess at some point prior to me owning it, the driver's window was broken.  The problem could of course be in the passenger door, but...

 

Unless there's some practical way to test the wiring loom or to apply voltage to the relevant pins of the existing lock mechanism, I think tomorrow the lock must be destroyed in order to get the door open.  If that's done, I can replace the lock, reassemble everything and at least take it for an MOT.

 

In all honesty, I can probably live with the door not locking for a fair while.  The car will mostly be used to get me to work where it can be parked safely, and from some time in March as a "bee van", which could get a bit exciting for anyone who decides to mess about with it.

 

James

We have re-entry!

 

 

I resorted to the "lump hammer and cold chisel" method of operating the central locking in the end.  I took out the only torx screw in the lock that I could reach and then gutted the lock by driving the cold chisel into the join, smashing the internals into small pieces.  I finally reached the "bolt" that forms the deadlock and prying that out with a hefty flat bladed screwdriver meant the door could just be popped open by operating the normal mechanism.

 

I do feel a bit bad about wrecking the lock when it might in fact be working perfectly fine, but without doing so there's really no simple way for a simple person like me to find the problem.

 

James

Another weekend, another session playing with the car door.  For a change, replacing the lock was an absolute doddle.  Half an hour's work, including what appears to be supposedly the tricky bit of getting the bowden cable reconnected to the outside handle.  Now I need to find some screws to fasten the inner door skin because I'll be damned if I'm going to rivet it back on.

 

Of course it can't be ignored that cars still hate me, so whilst I've been dealing with this it would appear that something has happened with the alternator.  The battery warning light on the dash comes on within about thirty seconds of the engine being started.  At the moment I'm not sure I have the motivation to deal with that myself.  Perhaps the alternator has just given up the ghost.  If it's the original (and I have no reason to believe it isn't), maybe after 170,000 miles it could be forgiven.

 

In fact it's not the only warning light showing.  The airbag warning stays on, too.  I suspect that might be something to do with the wiring in the door not being connected however (even though there's not actually an airbag in the door).  We'll see about that when I get it all reassembled.

 

James

Just to close out on this, the door is now reassembled.  There's still a cabling fault that I have yet to find -- the door doesn't deadlock at all, but I can live with that for the time being.  In the end I used Tek screws to re-attach the inner door skin to the outer rather than rivets.  Not ideal, but it does the job.

 

Now I just have to deal with the airbag warning light.  But that's for another thread I think.

 

James