Before purchasing my van, the seller informed me that the rear door handle didn’t work. When I walked around to the sliding side door, he informed me that door handle didn’t work, either. With a cargo cage installed directly behind the front seats, the only way to enter the rear of the van was through the rear doors, which were being held closed with a black rubber tarp straps. Even before handing the seller my cash, I knew fixing door handles would be one of my first projects.

I’ve been opening car doors my entire life and never once stopped to wonder what happens inside the door to make that happen. Like a lot of things in life, I don’t have to know how they work or understand the internal mechanisms to use them. How a car door handle worked is something I never thought about before, until this week.

Turns out, the door handle assembly is pretty simple. There’s a latch inside the door that opens when the handles are pulled, and closes when it strikes the little metal hoop bolted to the van. Connected to the door’s two handles (inside and outside) are cables that pull the latch assembly and release the latch.

I watched every YouTube video related to Ford Econoline door handles and they all say the same thing. The rubber sheath around the cables becomes brittle over time; when the piece that holds the cable in place inevitably breaks, you have to replace the cable. The problem was, after disassembling my door handle, it became clear that the cables were not the problem with my van! On mine, the latch itself was seized in the closed position. No amount of tugging on the cables would open the latch. It appeared that the former owner had smashed the door closed a hundred times with the latch in the closed position, permanently wedging it closed. Fortunately, Amazon sells the entire latch assembly complete with two new cables for $30.

While troubleshooting the problem, Jeff used a screwdriver and a lot of force to open the old latch. Problem solved! Well, almost. That night while wrapping things up, I instinctively shut the van door — this time (and for the first time) with the latch in the open position. This closed the latch (like a door should), but when I went to reopen it I discovered that the latch had seized up again. Now the latch was closed, with no way to access it.

Two days later the new assembly arrived from Amazon, but now I had a whole new problem. Step one began with “With the door open…”. There was literally no way to open the door. I tugged on those black cables as hard as I could, even using a pair of vice grips, but the door latch would not release. I tried pulling on the door from the outside and pushing on it from the inside with the same result: nothing. I sprayed an entire can of WD-40 inside the door assembly hoping that some of it would land or drip into the right place. Nothing.

A few days later, I decided to show my van to my friend Andy. Like Jeff, Andy is a master of tools and mechanical projects. Between te two of them, Jeff and Andy could probably build a rocket to Mars if they wanted to. Andy was working at the Fire Department, so I stopped by after hours and showed him the van. When I told him where Jeff and I were on the back door, Andy wanted to take a look at it. A second firefighter poked his head outside to see what we were working on and decided to climb inside the van and work on the door from that angle. A third firefighter walked by and stuck his hand inside the door to tug on the assembly. At this point there were three firefighters working on the van’s door with me standing by watching. In less than two minutes, the door swung open! My assumption that the latch wasn’t working wasn’t correct. I had shut the door on that black rubber tarp strap, which had the entire assembly in a bind.

With the door finally open, switching out the old latch assembly with the new one was a breeze. That’s a bit like saying crossing the finish line at the end of a marathon is easy — getting there’s the hard part! For $30 (plus $5 for a can of WD-40), I now have an entirely new back door latch assembly installed. The rear doors open and shut perfectly, thanks to Jeff, Andy, and a few other firefighters!

Next up… the side door.