The other day I was driving around and my door swung open when I went around a turn. The door mostly wants to stay closed but it'll occasionally swing open, and not want to shut. I checked out the latch, and I'm not sure what the right name is, but the parts that clamp around the post on the striker plate are loose and I can easily move then around. Sometimes they'll catch and will stay open or closed. I was looking around for any disassembly instructions and this is the best I could find: http://www.1bad6t.com/Maverick/repair/images/untitled388.gif I'm not sure I get everything that's going on in that diagram. I feel like I'll have to figure it out as I go along. If anyone has taken one of these apart before, do you think I'll be able to tell what when wrong by just looking at it once it's apart? I'm hoping that something like a spring just came off. Door latches don't look like the most widely available part.
If the latch mechanism will not hold fast to the striker bolt, then the latch mechanisim is most likely all you need to replace. In that photo it is labeled as assembly 26412. The striker bolt is shown as 22008. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the latch mechanism is left and right specific.
I spotted the correct latch on ebay, so I grabbed it. These apparently have a left and right side. I couldn't find one any place else. I'll just have to figure out the disassembly as I go. Having the driver door swing open when going around a freeway on ramp is a fun problem to have. Trying to pull it closed in that situation takes quite some effort.
I have a 73. I look through a few auto restoration websites and I was finding ones for 70-72. Ebay came through this time. I'm driving this car everyday, so I want to get this fixed fast. I didn't spend a lot of time shopping around.
I finally got a chance to get into this, and the problem is a broken spring. I'm glad I don't have to take out the latch. There's a window track right in front of it and I have no idea how I would deal with that. The inside of the door is just filled with broken up weather stripping and Burning Man dust. The door panel was easy to take off. It's held in by metal clips. I was worried that they might be plastic and that I would have to break every single one like I did when I had to take the door panel off my Toyota.
I took it once to Burning Man. Everyone was fascinated by it. When I was driving around looking for a place to camp, people kept stopping me every block to talk to me about my car. People were coming by my camp all week to talk to me about it. I met one person who said they worked on the assembly line installing the battery trays in these cars.
