Crumm: My truck has spent most of its time inside in the winter. Here lately due to brake troubles and bad mileage with my 75' I have been driving my 96' to work. After sitting outside at -30f to -40f for a couple of days the rear electric door locks don't want to function. When I return from a trip I have alot of crap to put in the back seat but the doors wont open. I have been reaching around from the front seat and popping up the lock but it is a pain when you have an armload of stuff. The front door locks seem to work just fine but the rear ones won't until they get warmed up a little. I am going to pull off the door panel and see if I can lube something up. Anyone know what needs lubed or adjusted? They seem to work OK if it is -20f or warmer.
Patrick Feeley: The rod that leads from the manual lock pull-up over to the latch area is usually tie-wrapped to the inner door sheetmetal. It is sometimes tight on the rod and also puts it at a bind. Remove door panel and cut the tie-wrap.
Crumm: I took the left rear panel off and found just what they said. There is a zip tie holding the rod from the lock mechanism to the knob that is VERY tight. I clipped it and lubed up the mechanism real good. I then went to the right rear door and just lubed the mechanism on it rather than pulling the door panel. The left one does feel a little more free than the right but just lubing the right helped a bunch. The truck will be outside from Thursday night until Saturday morning and it is currently -40 so we will see how they work Saturday morning. I will let you know if lube will do it or if cutting the zip-tie was necessary. To get the panel off you have to remove the lock knob, remove three screws on the bottom of the panel, remove one screw inside the arm-rest and then pry behind the panel near all the clips to get them popped loose. You can then unplug the electric window switch and the door courtesy light. To reinstall just remove all the plastic clips from the door (screwdriver and needle-nose) and then reinstall them on the door panel. Then just hook up the wires and put the panel back in place, push firmly on all clips and put the screws back in. No big deal to do.
Crumm: Test Results:
Truck was outside for 34 hours in temperatures around -30º to -40º. When I hit the unlock button the left rear unlocked and the right rear did not. So the story is lube alone will not fix the back door cold weather lock problem. You have to cut the tie-wrap in the door as well as lube them up. I did get the right to unlock by hitting lock-unlock a few times which would not unlock it before the lube job, so the WD-40 did help.
When I did it last time I flushed them down real good with wd-40 and then coated them with silicon spray. When it is warm they work fine, when it is -40 they don't work.
