That Blankety-Blank Door

Because my driver's side door has been so difficult to close, it got left slightly open during the last snowstorm. Now my carpets are quite soggy. Tom knew he HAD to deal with the door alignment so that the door wouldn't get left ajar again. He spent three hours on that job yesterday. He removed the driver's seat, kick-panel, and defroster duct to access the hinge bolts. He loosened the bottom hinge bolts and slightly lowered the back end of the door. That caused him to have to lower the latch plate on the car body. After some tweaking, he got the door latched. It still required a pretty good shove, but nothing like before. He found that he really had to crank down on the latch plate screws to keep the plate from moving when the door closed.

He reinstalled the duct, and since removing and replacing the duct disturbed the wiring behind the dash, he checked to make sure that all the dash controls still worked. Everything was fine except that the heater fan was not working (again), so he checked the pertinent fuse and it was fine. He checked to see if I had 12V at the heater switch - nothing. He checked the fuse box again and found that wire that is supposed to power the heater fan was connected to the blown back-up lights fuse instead of the blower fuse (the draw of the heater fan AND the back-up lights were too much for that fuse). He replaced the blown fuse and moved the fan connector to its correct location and everything worked fine. Since Ariel was still complaining that my heat never got very hot, Tom then looked at the HOT air control. While pressing down on the lever to make sure that the heater’s damper door was fully open, the cable broke. Using a vise-grips, he forced the cable completely in, so now all Ariel will get is heat. Add another item to the To Do list.

Leaving the doors open, he set up a fan to blow through my interior all night. This morning when he came out to drive me out of the garage, he couldn't get the door to close. He was NOT happy. It took a pretty good slam to get the latch to work. He didn't have time to deal with it, but he will tonight. VERY frustrating.