Chevy Astro broken rear door handle fix
I spent a good part of my weekend working on cars. Day one was spent on our 15 year old Chevy Astro. It needed it’s rear door handle fixed. The internal mechanism snapped, and because somebody at Chevy decided to save a few bucks and not put an interior door latch on these vehicles, the door was effectively sealed shut. All of this fix could be done at body shop in less time than I spent on it, but it would have cost more than I wanted to spend on our old back-up rig. I Googled a fix for it, and read several articles that said the door handle rivets needed to be drilled out from the outside. Well the articles were wrong. Do not drill these out. They are not rivets. They are bolts that are built onto the handle assembly, with the nuts on the inside of the door. They will not drill out easily, if at all. If they had it would have been a bigger problem fixing it. I quit on this route as soon as I noticed they were not rivets but not before chewing them up a bit with the drill.
The alternative is to get the interior panel off to get at the door handle release mechanism. This is not easy, with all of the plastic, and fancy padded vinyl on it. If your interior is in great shape like ours, you really don’t want to trash the back door. Removing the screws and prying at the plastic (fiberglass?) frame did not give me enough access room. Breaking the plastic frame 18-20 inches each direction from the interior right hand corner allowed the vinyl covered panel to be slipped down and bent over. This gave easy access to the rod to release the door latch.
Once the door was open there was an access panel to remove on the inside edge of the door, and the handle assembly was in full view. The lever off of the handle had broken off and was easily attached with a bolt, locking nuts and washers. Oiling the mechanism after reassembling made things function smoother.
The panel frame went together fine and only looks like a couple of cracks. I could fix it up nice with some epoxy, sanding and paint, but right now I have easy access to the door mechanism if it breaks again. It’s too bad Chevy didn’t spend a few cents to put an access panel here at least. Why would you make a door on a vehicle that couldn’t be opened from the inside anyway? These days even the trunks have exit latches.
This door fix could cost over a 100 dollars in a body shop. Even if the handle mechanism is broken differently, gaining access from the inside allows you to use the rear doors with a pair of pliers on the release rod. This way you can either live with a door that, now only opens from the inside, or go to the junkyard for mechanism parts.
There is one other thing to take note of with this project. Reading five articles of the 42,400 results on Google Search may not mean you have the best information yet. Hope this post saves some people some bucks, and a lot of trouble.
February 11th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Wow, John – -
Our big Suburban just had the same problem.
Body shop fix: $136.
Good job getting it done yourself.
February 11th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Nicely done.
February 13th, 2010 at 7:12 am
Good fix! It feels great to keep $ that way. The plastic radiator on my car cracked a couple years ago. I scraped it with my pocket knife, and made a patch of cotton fabric and POR-15 paint. Saved like $300 for a new radiator, because they said they couldn’t solder plastic.
One place you can save trouble is on the front doors, securing the window tracks. On our old Astro, now deceased, closing the front doors stressed the spot-welds that held the window tracks on the rear edge of the door, causing them to break after only 70,000 miles. Solution is to find the spot welds, drill holes next to the welds, and put in a short rivet or two. Much easier before the weld breaks, because they hold the track in alignment. I did both doors after the track broke loose in the driver’s side door.
Also check your steel brake lines for corrosion in the vicinity of the left front wheel and front frame members.
February 13th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
Hi George!
Thanks for the good info on the Astro. We really do like this van and hope to keep it going for some time.