Rover 25 passenger door wouldn't open

Our 2005 SEi 25 front passenger door refused to be opened and/or unlocked. Having trawled through our Forums and Googled the topic, I managed to resolve the problem fairly reasonably - but it does need time and patience.



This is how I went about it.

With the door locked shut, the door card cannot be removed easily. Secondly, the passenger seat is going to get in the way and restrict access.

Disconnect the battery (both leads) and wait for at least 10 minutes.

Move the seat fully forward and remove the rear Torx bolts (T30s I think); then slide the seat backwards and remove the front Torx bolts. Locate the seatbelt pre-tensioner connector block (mine was yellow) and disconnect. It was then quite easy to remove the seat from the car.

With a lot more room to work sit yourself down and remove as much of the door furniture as you can. The internal exterior door handle has two escutcheons that can easily break/crack, carefully prise the centre out and then the outer - bit fiddly. Keep them safe somewhere. Then remove the door pull. Carefully prise off the cover and unscrew the three Pozidriv screws that hold it in place.

Now for the door card. One of the card screws will be hidden by the dashboard, so take care with what follows. I used an old hub cap removal tool to carefully prise off the door card - the clips came away OK. Push the door lock pin down and the door card should now be able to be pushed up, over the pin and away from the door. I found the card to be fairly flexible and managed to work on the door lock by jamming myself between it and the door.

The next bit proved rather messy - and sticky. Peel away the vapour barrier to expose the cutaways in the inner door panel allowing you access to the lock. The mastic used on my car was like the proverbial on a blanket, but it does come off easily with either white spirit or water-soluble brush cleaner (I used Wickes). Covering the mastic with clingfilm helps.

I needed to work out how I was going to remove the lock and open the door without damaging the door itself.



Acting in haste and having obtained an incorrect replacement central locking solenoid from a breakers, I purchased an identical but correct (3 wires) one from eBay.

This proved to be useful as I could look carefully at the wrong one and devise a plan.

After much thought, I decided the way ahead was to grind off the tails of the door lock bolts and drill them out as the three fixing bolts screw into a relatively thin plate; prise/lever this plate off; prise/lever off the top plastic solenoid casing - which is in two layers - and then push the deadlock open.



That was the plan.



I discovered that my 18v cordless drill would fit in between the two door panels. However, it was too awkward to use.

Instead I used my small mains Proxxon drill and grindstones (that I thought wouldn't last against hardened steel bolts!). In the event I used only one to fairly quickly and fairly easily grind the top two of three bolts flush with the steel plate. The third bolt presented a problem because there is right-angled part that is used as pivot for the locking levers and it got in the way.

This came away using a small diamond disc and allowed better access to the third and final bolt.

Disconnecting the levers for both the locking pin and the internal outer door lock made life easier too.



I bought some "cobalt" drill bits to drill a pilot hole and then drill out the hardened bolts. They were worse than useless. I searched and found that Amazon sell deWalt cobalt drills in a small set - they arrived the next morning and were perfect. After some jiggling, prising, levering, the metal plate came off then the top part of the solenoid.

In looking at the incorrect solenoid, there is a "butterfly"-shaped piece that locks the deadlock. Prising this out released the lock and the door opened!



Expect thin - but not sharp - edges of the inner door panel; the usual cuts, nicks and broken fingernails; mastic.

There was no damage to the door card but there were some clips broken from the escutcheon and door pull.

Total working time taken was about ten hours. I missed several days due to the weather and family commitments and the work was done on our drive. I haven't included the time taken to research the topic, the tools, etc. I am fortunate that I have a lot of tools at my disposal - especially the smaller ones.

I'm no spring chicken (nearly 70) and working in two hour spells proved about right.



I hope this helps

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