Or just rebend the current spring to give less tension...

 

or just get electric door poppers and never use your handles again !!!

 

that's true... but how would you acquire the shaved look with the door handles if they're not really built onto the metal. I don't know if you get what I'm saying...

 

I don't think you could shave the door handles, besides I think it'd look like *** if the door handle area was just blank on an rx7. The benefit is its neat, and will save your door handles, and if the solenoid fails, you still have the door handle as back up!

-Alex

 

Dale,
Nice thread and the reminder to lube this stuff occasionally. I worked in my Dad's shop through college and made alot of money from people that didn't do some simple maintance.

I don't think I've had my handle apart and I'm not sure 'exactly' where the pastic handle typically fails...so this might be a stupid suggestion. But referring to the last pic that you posted (far right), what if you used some JB WELD or epoxy to mold the handle to the metal, effectively removing any chance that it could slip back and forth btwn those tabs? At the same time, it might also reinforce the plastic handle in that area. I'm just not sure if you could reassemble it once this was done. Just a thought.

 

Just as Dale said..."It happened to me today - pulled up my driver's side door handle, and nothing happened. " .....I wish I woulda caught this thread sooner....too late now...thanks for the awesome writeup Dale....well....goin to take my door handle apart now... = (

 

stuck door handle fix

i had a STUCK door handle. fixed it today after a week of not having time to open it up. the point of failure was nothing internal. when i opened it up, i figured out that when the angle shown in red was opened up just 3-4 degrees it would be in a position that the handle would no longer be stuck. basically the reduced(sharper) angle prevents the mechanism to push/swing the rod downward. [this makes sense-- for instance if the two arms shown below were perfectly overlapped (eg.180 or 0 degrees separation) it would be impossible to produce a rotational force to push the lower arm downward].

reusing dales picture


there are plenty of points to rig something up keep the angle from becoming too small, but internally this is not ideal since it would require either wedging something either at the angle or against one or both of the arms to keep it opened up. but this method is a lot of work and is prone to failure due to constant wear on the moving parts.

the solution i came up with was to prevent the handle from sitting flush in its handle-area(in this position the angle is kept in that slightly open configuration). so i looked under, and noticed that mazda had thought of this already. there's one of those rubber "feet" things that supports the handle up, the original problem is that mine is WORN. lol.

i stuck some foam weatherstrip over the worn rubber bumpstop and tested the handle out.. perfect.