I know it's been addressed a few times in tech articles, but after I posted a question about my solenoids a few people asked me some questions and asked for a tech on how I did mine. Primarily I was asked how to get the latch to open when it needs to be pulled a different direction than the solenoid is mounted. The car being smoothed is a '56 Pontiac. I believe 55-57 GM cars all used the same latches so this application will be identical to many cars, but not all of 'em! Start with this here: Next step is to remove the interior handles, door panel, kick panel, and any covers that may block your access to the inside of your door. This is what you'll see: By actuating the interior handle, you can see that the rod pulls forward to disengage. That's 90 degrees from just about the only place in the door you can mount the solenoid! But let's not get ahead of ourselves. With no exterior handles, you want your system to be as reliable as possible. One of the ways to help reliability is to make it as easy as possible for the solenoid to operate the latch mechanism. What I did before installing anything was remove the latch and lube/clean the hell out of it till it takes the least amount of effort to open. I may have missed it, but I've never seen a tech that mentioned the resistance that the interior handle linkage puts on the solenoid. The '56 Poncho here would have never opened if the solenoid had to pull the interior handle too! To solve this I replaced the linkage between the inside handle and latch with a cable. When the inside handle is pulled, it operates the latch by pulling on it. When the solenoid operates, the cable between the latch and the inside handle goes slack. Little or no extra resistance on the solenoid! The cable is kept where it belongs by a wire clamp. Notice that the ends of the cable are wrapped with tape after being fixed in place by the crimp connectors. The purpose of the tape is to keep the sharp ends of the wire from making you bleed. BTW the cable is 1/16" braided steel available by the foot at hardware stores and the crimp connectors are usually right next to the cable! All of it's cheap too! Somewhere along the line I tack welded the inside lock mechanism just a little. Keep in mind, if your door is locked, a solenoid won't open it either! I kept the weld to a minimum in case I ever need to use it for some reason. Even if you are filling the lock handle hole in the inside trim, I suggest still welding the lock to make sure it doesn't lock when you hit a bump or slam the door. The solenoid will be mounted in the rear door bottom, and will pull straight down. To open the door it will need to pull forward, so I used a pulley like this one: It came from the local hardware store and was with the screen door repair parts. A nice feature of this particular pulley is the ball bearing. Easy to move = less effort wasted by the solenoid. I cut off the mounting tab part of the bracket and welded the pulley/bracket to the door in a recessed part of the door that allows the door panel to still fit flash against the door without interference. Be careful when locating the pulley to keep this cable from getting in the way of the other one, and most importantly so that the cable pulls the latch as straight as possible. Note in this pic that you'll need to drill a hole to route the cable through. Be sure to protect the cable in some way to keep it from fraying if it rubs against the edge of the hole. Also note that I added a wire clamp near the latch to keep the cable from rubbing on the edge near the latch. On the other end, I used some heat shrink tubing to prevent chafing of the cable where it passes through the solenoid. I taped both ends of this cable as well to minimize the bleeding. The rest of inside installation is very straight forward. I couldn't get pictures of how I mounted the solenoid, but here are a few things to keep in mind: Mount the solenoid in as straight a line as possible to the pulley. Check to see BEFORE mounting the solenoid to see that the window clears everything in its entire range of motion. Before bolting the solenoid on be sure that you clean all the paint off around the solenoid bracket to aid in grounding. At the suggestion of another HAMBer, I also added a ground wire from one of the mounting bolts to the inside of the door jambs by the kick panel. The reason for this is that the only things that ground the door to the chassis are the hinge pins. Not enough for me to rely on! Something else that I did a little too late to save one fuse was to wrap the bottom of each solenoid with a piece of bicycle inner tube to keep the +12v terminal on the solenoid from touching the door bottom. Good thing my window was down! Now you'll need to remove the outer handle and lock cylinder. Patch the holes with sheet metal making sure to quench each tack weld with a wet rag. The area between where the handle was and the lock cylinder used to be is really prone to warping, so keep it as cool as possible! Use a little filler......... And follow it up with paint! And now how I did my trunk......most likely this has been covered before, but I couldn't find it in the search. I have only a picture of the finished inside stuff: I started by closing the latch with the trunk open and, while turning the key, I watched to see where in the key's rotation the latch released. Mark the point just before the latch releases. I then removed the lock cylinder and disassembled it. To allow the cylinder to spin without the key inserted, I discarded the lock tumblers and re-assembled the cylinder. Re-install the latch and weld a small metal arm to the piece that sticks through to the inside of the trunk. Mount the solenoid so that it pulls as straight a line as possible. Turn the arm that's been welded on to the point you marked just prior to where the latch releases. Secure the arm in this position temporarily (the return spring on the lock cylinder should try to turn the arm the other way). At this point all that's left to do is attach the solenoid cable to the arm you welded on, and smooth the deck lid. Soon I plan to cover all this to prevent items in the trunk from sliding into the linkage and preventing the trunk from opening. Hopefully this helps someone! It was much easier than I thought and I hope for my windows' sake that it's reliable! Above all think it all out before doing anything! Johnny
What is done in case the battery fails. Is there a hand pull cable, or do you have battery jumper mounts hanging under the car. I know there has to be a fail-safe if the battery goes, but didn't see anything listed about that in the post. Thanks for the Tech. Awesome . Carl Hagan
Great tech post. The photos make it all really make clear sense. By the way, I just noticed yesterday that a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue trunk latch is cable operated and has an electric solenoid built right in (in case anyone wants to make their trunk electric). My guess is all late-1990s GMs have the same or similar latches.
Crap! Forgot to include that......I mounted two buttons in my engine compartment to manually operate the solenoids and am planning on running a choke cable to one of the doors soon. If the car battery goes dead or the remote battery dies, I plan (for now) on using jumper cables to the battery and using the manual buttons to get in. Johnny
Bringing back to top a simple and easy solution for shaving. Concept seems easy enough. Add a manual popper for the just in case and would be a keeper.
Stumbled upon my old tech post accidentally and wanted to give you guys an update. Almost 10 years later and still works like new! Only thing I'd do different now (and hope to do so soon) is make the buttons in the engine compartment look like they belong there. Aside from that, pretty happy with how well it has all held up!
In case this post is useful to anyone, I fixed the pictures since photobucket decided to stop allowing posting on message boards. 11 years later and still working fine, by the way!
The Jalopy Journal
