Sunday, July 28, 2019

Replacing KARR's Door Ajar Switches


I was able to source the Fiero's door ajar switches, one from eBay and one from RockAuto.  The picture below is the one from eBay and is for the driver side door.

I never unhooked the original door ajar switch.  I just left it in the door cavity.  Therefore the first step was to remove the original switch.



With the switch out you can see where it is broken.


In comparing the new switch with the old, the old switch had a male end where it plugged into the wire harness.  The new switch had a female end identical to the harness.  This is problematic and will require me to cut and reuse the old ends.


I spliced the old ends onto the new switches.


I used self-sealing self-soldering butt connectors.  These are very similar to heat shrink tubing but much more durable.  Once heated, the solder ring melts, soldering the two wires together, and the plastic casing shrinks and seals around the wire just like heat shrink tubing.







Even though these connections are isolated from one another, I separated them with and then wrapped both connections with black electrical tape.


I repeated the procedure for the passenger side door ajar switch, which I had removed when it broke taking out the latch assembly.




Back to the driver side door.  I reused all of the wire clips that held the wire and clipped onto the door in predesignated spots.


Even though the switch was inside the door, I had turned the screw back into the latch assembly so it would not get lost.  I had to remove this so I could use it to install the new switch.


I want to mention that these switches were intended to be installed on the latch assembly before the latch assembly was installed in the door.  Since I already removed the latch assembly once to clean it, and everything is working so perfectly, I really did not want to remove the latch assembly again to install these switches.  You can get to the screw and where the door ajar switch mounts.  It is just very tight and at a very inconvenient angle.  Long story short, it is a pain in the ass and it took a very long time.  You might think I would have been better off removing the latch assembly, but I still stand by the way I did it for fear of losing everything I had gained with the latch assemblies the first time around.


I dropped the screw several times while trying to get it in place and used my inspection camera several times to locate it.


I finally got the driver side door ajar switch installed!


With the switch it was time to test to make sure the door ajar light was working properly.  It was!


Last step: reassemble the driver side door panel.



I repeated the same process for the passenger side door.  However, I did this after work one evening.  I was alone so I did not have my camerawoman, and it was 95 degrees in the garage.  Therefore, there are no pictures of this process, but it was the exact same as the driver side, with the exception that it involved some Chicken McNuggets from McDonald's. ;)

2 comments:

  1. Great write up and pictures! It really helps since I have to do the dame thing :)

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  2. I am glad you found the post helpful. Best of luck on yours! Thanks for reading!

    ReplyDelete