I had the door handles taken off my 300C and replaced with 'poppers'. Looked really cool. But boy am I regretting it now. Those must have been designed just for California and other warm climates. They are a PIA in Canadian winters. They freeze up and won't work until they thaw out. I have to crawl in through the trunk to be able to open the door from the inside.

I had the installer include an emergency cable so I could manually operate at least one door. Except there seems to be no good route for that cable and it took two men and a small boy to be able to operate it. And now it has seized completely. Totally useless.

So I got to thinking, could I just keep a slim jim in the trunk? (the factory trunk latch popper works just fine. Go figure) Except if I understand it, the slim jim just UNLOCKS the door. It doesn't unlatch it. I.E. it hooks onto the locking mechanics, not the latch mechanics. You still need outside door handles to operate the latch itself. So what can I use to mechanically unlatch the doors when there are no outside handles?

If I leave the window down I can reach in and pull on the inside door handle and that works, even if the door is locked. Is there some location where I can hook something like a slim jim onto a shaft or cable that operates the inside door handle? Or is there already a commercial product to solve this problem and I just need to buy and install it?

Or maybe there IS a location where the slim jim (or similar tool) can hook onto the latch itself?

 

Modifications often demonstrate the "law of unintended consequences".

So what the hell are ya going to do?

 

You can always keep a hammer in your coat pocket and go in through the window. ;-)

 

I won't need the hammer unless and until the factory installed popper on the trunk stops working. I also posted re: a dead battery. Dead, dead, dead. Not even enough power to light up a door open message on the dash. Yet the trunk popper worked fine. So how come that one works and the aftermarket ones for the doors don't? ?Maybe it has a AAA battery installed right on the trunk opener itself? With an electronic one-way circuit doohickey? (Damn, I used to know what those electronic one-way circuit doohickies were called.) The trunk opener seems to have a coiled spring rather than a solenoid. Maybe I should look into that and see if I can replace the aftermarket door solenoids with recovered junkyard trunk opener springs

If someone has some pictures and drawings of the physical linkage from the outside handle to the latch I might be able figure out where to hook the slim jim into it. Or fabricate and install a hook for the slim jim to reach.

Or maybe just go to a towing service and ask if they know where to insert a slim jim?

"Unintended consequences" Yeah, plus cheapjack ways to cover over the recesses where the handles were. I had a garage that "specializes" in custom work do this, plus some other work. They basically glued the steel patches in place rather than weld them. And the special kind of body filler they used bubbled (Vette Bond, I think it was). Repeatedly. Eventually I got tired of leaving my car with them while the repaired and repainted them and just ground them off and covered the holes with Duct tape until I could learn to weld them in myself. Like that's ever going to happen Maybe I can replace the mechanicals for one door handle, up to but not including the handle itself and just pull the duck tape away enough to reach the linkage and press the tape back in place once I have the door open.

Damn thing looked sharp when I first had it done, all black (a custom black 2/3 of the way from shiny towards flat. very nice) nosed and decked, fake Lake pipes. And smooth doors. Now it looks like I tried to rat rod it. And screwed that up too.