Despite what I said yesterday, I was working on formatting Lady of Thorns today when it occurred to me to check the outside temps.

83°F. And tomorrow was supposed to be back in the nineties. I dropped what I was doing and headed out to the garage to do battle.

See, I’ve had a long-term problem with the driver’s side front door on my Mazda 3. I suspect it’s due to the fact that the driver’s side is the one that catches the full Texas sun in the afternoon, and that heat is degrading or damaging components. As a result the central locking button doesn’t always work, I can’t manually lock the door from the inside, and my Door Ajar light will come on and stay on no matter how hard I slam the door. I would have to manually lock the door from the outside to get the light to go off, and recently that hasn’t been working unless I stand there for a minute and lock/unlock/lock/unlock the door until the light finally goes off. I don’t want to leave the light on because that drains the battery over time, damaging it, so I’ve been putting the car in the garage where the driver’s side wouldn’t get roasted every afternoon.

Being my grandfather’s granddaughter, I looked up reasons for what was going on and found a couple of possible solutions. The easiest was to spray contact cleaner inside the little clamping mechanism that holds the door closed because the grease in it may be gooked up, stopping it from making contact when it closes and fooling the car’s computer into thinking that the door isn’t closed properly. So I did this (I also need to add some white lithium grease when I can find the tube of it, which is SITH), cleaned away the gunk that indeed came out of the mechanism, then got in the car and closed the door. The Door Ajar light stayed on, but when I hit the central locking button the door locks clunked solidly and the light went off.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s more of a bodge than a fix. So I got out my tools and carefully started taking off the door interior panel (there’s a recessed panel behind the handle that hides a screw. Wanna know the perfect tool for popping it off? A curved sculpting tool. You’re welcome). Got that off and various wires disconnected, then checked all of the wiring I could see. There were no obvious worn/melted parts, which was reassuring.

Then I followed a set of wires down to the side of the door near the clamping mechanism. The wires plugged into a round outlet that I assumed controlled the mechanism based on its location. I unplugged the wires, hit the outlet with more contact cleaner, then plugged the wires back in. Next I went around the door, found every contact I could find and cleaned them all with contact cleaner, then put the door back together.

Got in the car and closed the door gently. The Door Ajar light went off. I’m not absolutely sure that I fixed the problem and I still want to give that clamping mechanism a good coating of white lithium grease, but so far it’s holding. If I can nurse it through to this fall I’ll buy a new clamping mechanism and install that when it’s not quite so warm outside (even at 83°F I was dripping with sweat by the time I went back inside, and that was with the garage door open).