Horseshoes - sometimes you have them, sometimes you don't.

It hasn't been an especially good year for me, **** keeps breaking, my house needs a new roof etc.

So when I returned to my car two days ago and lifted the door handle to get in and the whole damn metal plate came out 1" at the top I was worried this was going to be a nightmare.

I couldn't really find any photos, so I took some. It took all of 40 seconds to fix, so if your door handle plate isn't as sturdy as you like, here's what you're looking at.


When I went to open my door, this happened. I could see down inside and had a pretty good idea of what was going on.



The first thing you need to do is remove the interior plastic - the moon shaped piece. I can assure you it is only held on with pressure clips. I get nervous as I've been told that before with my Z32 and broken some plastic pieces, but here's a photo for proof. Just pull this off. It's easiest to pry from the back.

The two pegs are the pressure clips. They're sturdy



Be careful when you do - my bolt had come right off the exterior metal anchor, luckily I have reflexes like a cat. (an old crippled cat, but a cat nonetheless)

Here's what the bolt looks like. It's actually a small section of thread and a nut.
Take the nut off, feed the threaded section back into the metal piece that the door handle is attached to - it will bottom out and now it's easy to tighten the 10mm nut. I used a small ratchet because this part does see a decent load fairly often and I didn't want it to back off and end up doing this next week again.



Here's what you'll be looking at once the cover is pried off. You can see my lower nut was still holding, but it had backed off considerably. The nut and bolt from the last photo goes in the uppermost hole. The two holes in the flat face are for the pressure clips from the interior trim.

I have no idea how both of these nuts backed off, or how my door handle was rigid until the top nut fell right out Regardless it's fixed and a non-issue now.

I hope this helps someone somewhere.

 

As if on queue my lawnmower wont run.

 

same thing happen to me except the threads in the latch were stripped. I ended up using a longer stud to catch the remaining threads at the very end.

 

^^^ That's what I was worried about - that or that when I took the assembly apart it was going to be a nightmare to get the handle mechanism to work properly.

I had my 300ZX broken into years ago, the window shop screwed up the passenger window install and the window never did work properly. the mechanism for the window was insanely complicated and I never did end up fixing it.

 

I don't often have much to contribute here, but I was working on this exact problem last night!

I had the same issue, but it was the lower threaded piece and nut that came loose. It looks like the stud was intended to be fixed in the outer door handle permanently - at least on mine the threads were all full of some sort of black resin that I could not get off. I tried acetone and lacquer thinner, etc. - made the top nice and clean, but didn't touch the resin at all. I'm not sure, but my guess is that it had fallen out with a prior owner and that was their solution. However, with the threads all gummed up, I couldn't get them to go back in anymore, so I decided to just replace it altogether. Besides, the threaded piece/nut concept seemed weird to me.

I went to Home Depot and got a few stainless steel, pan-head bolts with Philips drive. They call the size M6-1.0. It's 6mm with a 1.0 thread pitch. At my HD all the metric stuff is in drawers in the fastener area. I ended up getting 2 lengths - 10mm and 12mm. I also picked up some 6mm washers.

The 10mm was too short to engage the threads and the 12mm was too long to hold the pieces together. The combination that ended up working for me was the 12mm with 1 washer. Nice and tight! Hopefully this will work out as a permanent solution, but if not it should be much easier to tighten up.