Discovery II (TD5) 2004 - Rear Door won't open from inside, WILL o

[rjsdavis]

Hello to all

I've googled this, and cannot find a solution or indeed another post that's the same - so sorry if I've missed it.

Our rear door has only ever opened from the outside. It opens fine from the outside. It also unlocks / locks with the central locking without problem.

I've just had to replace the rear windscreen wiper motor and arm, so thought I'd see if I could cure whilst the rear door card was off. I can see that the inner handle cable is connected to the latch. When I pull the handle, I can feel the cable being pulled and can hear that the latch is being "adjusted" internally. (BTW - I can confirm that the child lock is off - I have tried wriggling the child lock on/off, and when it's on, I can hear that the internal handle definitely does less to the latch - which is what I would presume it should do).

Has anyone else had this? It's not the end of the world, but it does mean that passengers in the dicky seats cannot let themselves out of the car which is a little annoying. As I say, can find plenty of threads about the rear door either not unlocking or not being able to be opened from the outside, but not this issue. The doors still apart, so was going to unbolt the latch and c/l actuator and remove to see if there's something really obvious that I can't see whilst it's all in place inside the door.

Would be dead handy if there's a common fix for this particular niggle.

Many thanks for any pointers.

[rjsdavis]

SOLVED!

I got a suggestion on a another forum that it might be a stretched cable - sure enough, it was.

I removed the latch/actuator unit and once this was free of the door, I was able to pull the inner door lever cable further than you can when it's all installed. The door latch clicked open, and I was able to see, that the first 25% or so of the movement of the inner door handle was pretty slack. When you pulled the inner door handle as far as it would go whilst it was in place, and then compared it to how far it needed to be pulled to release the latch - there was a noticeable difference.

I could then see that the cable itself had fixed anchors on either end, and there was no scope or ability to adjust the tension in the cable at all. I needed to fabricate something to take up the excess slack from the stretch, and the only way that I could see that this could be done, is where the outer cable housing enters the small black plastic stop that clips into the door, just short of the inner door handle itself.

As a cyclist, I had tons of outer gear and brake housing in the garage, so I snipped off a very short (about 1/2 cm) of black cable housing. The only problem with this is that the inner door cable is fixed, and there's no way to get the housing over the inner cable, so using some cable cutters, snipped along the long side of the short slice of cable outer to open it out. What this actually did was to disintegrate it into multiple individual parts - however, I used the individual shards and then used the black plastic cable housing to keep it in place on top of the inner cable, then stuffed the lot into the black plastic grommet that sits beside the inner door handle itself. I needed to pull the cable through in order to get it into the black plastic grommet/stop so this definitely took up the slack. Once the cable had been hooked back into the door handle, and the main latch re-fitted back into the door, shut the latch with a screwdriver and hey presto - she's working from both the inner and outer door handles. Result. It's hard to explain exactly, but see the three pics I've uploaded below for how the mod was created and how it ended up in the cable stop/grommet.

So, she's all working again now - rear tailgate working exactly as it should be.

Here are the pics:

https://www.landyzone.co.uk/land-rover/discovery-ii-td5-2004-rear-door-wont-open-from-inside-will-open-from-outside-and-unlocks-fine.297387/#post-3705092