I replaced the driver's front door on my 91 245 (it had some damage and I'd found the right color replacement at the junkyard). When I put it all back together the door won't lock neither with the key nor from my pushing the lock button.

When I push the lock button (I do this with the door closed), it doesn't feel like it's stuck, but rather it feels like it should if I was pushing the button while the door was open. (A feature I assume exists to prevent us form locking the keys in the car).

I figure there are two possibilities:
1) The crumby wires on the little collar around the lock cylinder have shorted (the shielding wasn't in great shape, but I've seen much worse).
or
2) There's a way that this collar needs to be indexed somehow to work correctly.

Does anyone have experience with replacing that collar thing? Do I need to make sure it's oriented a certain way? It looked like it would only fit on in one position, but maybe I screwed that up somehow. Or did I do something else completely wrong?

Any thoughts to help prepare me when I pull the door apart again?

Thanks as always!

This isn't a switch problem because the driver's door lock is entirely mechanical.

I imagine you swapped your old keylock into the replacement door. Just make sure the arm from the lock cylinder is engaged with the lock at "F" below and not jammed one side or the other. The position of pin "P" from the latch on the outside of the door is what tells the mechanism the door is open and prevents the button and the key from locking it.

Could be the lock was broken in the donor door?


--
Art Benstein near Baltimore

Velcro - what a rip off!

Correct, I swapped the lock cylinder from the original door into this new one. The arm from the lock cylinder is in the correct position.

Of course it's possible that the mechanism on the replacement door is broken or seized. I suppose I was thinking too hard, but this seems like the most likely explanation (and one that I'm not sure I would have had enough sense to check without you pointing it out.

Thanks as always. I'm planning to dig back into it over the upcoming long weekend, hopefully I'll have more luck this time!