Keyless Entry Install
 

Has anyone installed keyless entry on a 3rd gen? My friend has one, and he paid $800 to have an alarm with keyless entry put on, they told him in order to work with keyless entry they had to take his doors apart and put new lock actuators in. Is that true? Sounds kinda hokey to me, i've installed quite a few in other cars and can't imagine how an actuator could be so different that it wouldn't work with a keyless entry system. Just wondering if my friend got ripped off or not.

I took mine to a sorry ass stereo shop (never again) and they charged me $200.00 out the door w/the alarm/actuater/labor. I wasn't complaining about the price, just the damn wait (7 freakin hours for them to finish it)! He said he's never worked on a rx-7 before and was jumping from job to job. There's never ever any good service nowadays. Mechanics and installers half-ass everything, the jobs are poorly done too. You'd think with the amount of excessive time they have to work on your motor, it'd be quality. But no there just fuckin lazy and cutting corners, then call you with some dumb excuses that they ran into some problems. Yeah right! I'm sure most of you know that feeling.

So you did have to take your doors apart and replace the actuators then?

You have to install a driver's side actuator. There's allready one in the passenger's side door. Seems that the trouble is installing it so that you don't break the workings of the unlock mechanism and finding a place to hid it in there.

This might be a dumb question, but why do they have an actuator on the passengers side and not drivers????

The passenger side actuator unlocks the passenger door whenever the driver side door is unlocked with a key. I assume that this is a feature they installed in lue of power locks so that once you got in you wouldn't have to reach across to unlock it. It took me a while to figure out that it unlocked when I unlocked it from outside. I thought that I just kept leaving it unlocked somehow.

I thought the 7 had power doors?? I could of sworn they did.. some people had a big debate about this not long ago and some said they had them and others didnt... Wuts up with that??

The door lock assembly in the driver's side door is kind of a pain in the ass to remove. I replaced it with one from a RHD car (driver's side is the passenger side on a RHD car, so it had a door lock w/ a built in actuator). It bolts right in and a stereo shop should be able to hook it up to an aftermarket alarm for keyless entry. If you use an external actuator, the cables may eventually break so be careful... there's been a couple of good threads on this in the past, use the search function to find it.

Driver's side door does not have an actuator... if you unlock the driver's side, it will send a signal to the pass side actuator and open the pass side. If you unlock the passenger side, there's no actuator on the driver's side so it will not unlock.

When I had a alarm shop put my alarm/keyless entry in... they had to drill the actuator into the door. While doing this, they drilled right into the power window motor module! My windows started to make noise as I rolled it up and down. I had them replace this. Be careful on the size/length of the screw.

the acutator is acutally a basic General Motors relay. it may look fancy but its just a relay. and if its a reputable shop they should have a color code book and not even need to go through the door panel, and just in stall the relay under the dash near the steering column.