K, I have to say, I am a much happier dude right now. I can't remember where I found the info, been searching on here so I could reply, but gave up.

Long story short, there is a posting in here somewhere stating how one guy fixed his actuators. I didn't want to spend $100 CDN each or buy some cheap crap off Ebay that wasn't specific to my truck, so I went through the steps this guy posted and man, am I impressed!!!!!!

To whom ever that was that posted about how to fix the actuators by getting at the little motors and replacing the thermal resistor, THANK YOU!!!!!! This was the best fix with NO COST I have ever done. Best part is that now the gear box (actuator housing) is now servicable. LOVE IT!!!!!

Cheers man!
:-)

PS - I can post that information on here if anyone else is interested, I just want to make sure no one thinks this was my idea, I most certainly do not want to take credit for this.

 

I'm interested. Please post it.

Thanks.

 

No worries, here it is.


WARNING: The following is long winded, but if you want your PDL's to work again WITHOUT spending any $$ read on.

I finally got tired of my non-working PDL's and decided to tear into my truck and find/fix the problem. There has been many discussions about possible issues and I have concluded that the majority of us are seeing actuator motor problems and not relays, switches etc. Ill start by saying the problem I have had is that when I hit the switch, the locks attempt to move and after repeated attempts, the signal appears to get weaker and weaker until nothing....I assumed relay or switch.....NOT THE CASE!

First I started by testing the signal at the harness plug to the actuator. Perfect. No issues here. Next I completely removed the actuator/lock mechanism and bench tested them with 12V..Here lies the problem. The actuator acted the same as when in the truck. First I did a thorough cleaning of all of the mechanism so it works freely and still had the same results. Here's where it get's tricky. These things are built so that they are NOT serviceable. I had already decided that they were going to need to be replaced, so I decided to break them open for closer inspection. It comes apart relatively easily, but appears that It cannot be put back together once apart. I drilled out two small rivets and then pried the case apart. As you pry the case apart you'll notice these small little plastic rods protrude up through the case cover. These rods are then "mushroomed" with heat through the upper case and then sealed with some kind of silicone. When you pry apart the case the "mushroom" head breaks off and the rod remains. You can dig out the silicone and mushroom head with a pick. It comes out very easy. Inside you will find a very small motor and some gear mechanism. I believed the problem at first to be worn brushes or dirty commutator contacts in the motor itself. You'll have to bend two little metal tabs out and pull off the brush housing on the back of the motor. I cleanded the gunk off the brushes and took 1500 grit to the commutator contacts and reassembled the motor. The motor worked, but if you applied even a slight amount of resistance on the armature, it would stop the motor. It should have been WAY stronger than this. I was stumped until I looked a little closer at the inside of the plastic brush housing. Inside you'll find a small, thin rectangular (thermal resistor relay, dodad, thingamabob??) pardon my ingnorance, but I'm not sure what to call it. All I know is that this little part is what keeps you from burning up the motor, should you continue to press the switch once the lock has been actuated. It appears that this thing wears out over time and will not allow enough signal to get through to the motor to make it work. THE FIX. I am cheap. Since I had done so much work up to this point, I decided that I would go a little further and try to make it work without spending the $$. I have better things to spend my money on than actuators. I took a small piece of aluminum foil and wrapped the "thing" voila! Perfectly working motor! I sat there and operated the thing for 10 minutes including one or two times stopping the armature and holding down the switch to see what would happen. The motor builds heat, but not much. Not enough to worry about. Now that I had a good working motor I decided I would try and reassemble the unit. The problem is you cannot glue the unit together as there is a rubber gasket around the perimiter of the case and if you tried to glue the rods into the case, you would not have enough pressure on the two halves of the case to keep the gears in place (these things actually apply a great deal of torque on the case) What I decided to do is completely break off the plastic rods flush with the bottom side of the case and then drill out the bottom case and screw it together. This worked perfectly. You'll need screws that are the same diameter as the holes in the top of the case to keep it from "wandering". Also the screws should not protrude through the back of the unit as some of the mechanism has some pretty close tolerances and a screw sticking through the back would not allow some of the mechanism to work (this can be remedied with a decent set of wire dikes or a hacksaw). I know all of this is hard to picture, but if you do decide to try this fix, you'll see what I am describing here. The locks are back in and working flawlessly.

 

great information, my passenger side doors , the locks will sometimes lock and sometimes unlock, it is so frustrating,, i was going to just replace the noids. but im going to try your fix, and see what happens..

 

Thank you...I shall try it when I get the chance.

 

Figured I'd post an update. Since I went through all four controls, they are working flawlessly!!!! This is a DEFINITE fix.

 

thanks a lot i was just goig to look up the same thing mine stopped working recently now i know what to do..... thanks deno

 

Great post... saved for future reference. Thanks for putting that all down, and thanks to whoever came up with it originally!

 

Kalsc can you please post the steps you followed. I'm having the same problem with my 01 psd. Thanks man!

 

Awesome fix. Aluminum foil. I fixed all 4 doors on my 2000 f-350 crew. The locks are working like they were new.

 

My only observation is that this could be a diode or resistor (or some odd part) to prevent voltage spikes in one direction or the other from frying some part.

I don't doubt that the 'fix' works (and that it's a clever solution), but it's not inconceivable that there might be downstream issues with this.

Then again, I installed aftermarket door lock motors, so who am I to talk ;-)

Steve

 

From what I know, the little bit that effectively burns out is a thermal resistor. As it heats up, say . . . when you hold you finger on the lock/unlock button, the thermal resisitor heats up and goes into a high resistance state thereby limiting the current to the actuator motor, protecting it from burning out.

As these thermal resistors fail, they fail into a contstant high resistance mode thereby ALWAY limiting the current to the actuator motor which then doesn't have enough jam to move the lock/unlock mechanism.

The only negtive side effects I can see THE FIX having are, if you did hold down the lock/unlock button for an extended period of time, you could then burn out the motor.

To this date, my door locks are working as if brand new again. :-)

 

Completed this fix this weekend, It took about an hour to do the first one and about an hour and a half to do the remainding 3.

The first time I spun the motor after reassembly I split the case back open again. I then further reinforced the a$$ end of the little actuator and all four locks work great now.


WB

 

Coolbeans! I replaced the passenger side actuator last summer...now the driver side is doing it! I saved the old actuator, actually...so I'll perform surgery on it tomorrow! Thanks for the idea ...you saved me $42 bucks from Ford! LoL

Scott

 

AWESOME!!! This most definitely works. My drivers door does not work at all and rear passenger door would only "wiggle" the lock when activated. Other two doors work fine for one or two cycles, but after that get significantly weaker and all they do is "wiggle" the lock without doing anything.

I decided to try this on the rear passenger door first since is allllllllllllll the way across the cab and hard to unlock for someone by hand. (Im lazy that way ). Followed the instructions above and now this door works like new. Will do the other doors this weekend. The only change I did was I did not remove all of the plastic rods with mushrooms caps, I only removed half of them and put screws in the rest. That way the cap for the mechanism would line up like it was original and wouldnt need realignment due to off centered screw holes.

I ended up removing and replacing this about 3 times before I got it right. (Mental note: read all instructions two to three times before attempting so as not to forget a step) Working from memory, first I thought the resistor was inside the plastic case. When I didnt see it, I was getting low on daylight so put everything back together. A lil over an hour. Next time, after rereading the instructions, I disassembled, did the fix, and reinstalled in about an hour. But the fix didnt work. It was late and I didnt feel like messing with it again. The next afternoon I again removed the part and checked things out again and inside the motor brush cap, one of the brushes had gotten pushed back to against the housing and there is actually a clip to hold the brush back in this position. Was releasing the brush from the clip and reinstalling the lock works like new. I can cycle the locks and while the other doors get weak after a couple of cycles this lock continued to work at full strength with no weaknesses.

The first time it took a little while to remove all the linkages (over an hour), by the third time I removed the mechanism, serviced the unit, and had it all back in the door ready to go in 30 minutes.