From: John.Burgess@amd.com Date: 09 Oct 96 12:51:31 -0500 Subject:Rekeying Door/Ignition Locks Here it is. Sorry for the dealay. Is pretty easy, except for maybe the ignition lock. Background: I bought a '73 Z car that came with two different keys. I didn't test all the locks with the keys when I bought the car, however when I got the car home, I found two keys only worked the ignition and the drivers door. I couldn't lock the hatch and I couldn't unlock the passenger door from the outside. So for a month or two, I just made sure that when I parked the car, I didn't leave anything in it that I wouldn't really miss if a thief tried the rear hatch (this included the obigatory emergency tool kit). Well one day, I had a little mechanical problem on the interstate about a hundred miles from home. The starter shorted out. The damn thing would not stop. Ever try to remove the hot wire from the starter with a pocket knife, a tire iron and a set of jumper cables before it ran down the battery, caught on fire or worse? I had no tools in the car because I couldn't lock it. But I digress. Eventually, I remembered I had an '83 parts car with one key and working locks. After a days work, I now have a 1 key 240 Z with working locks and some emergency tools in it. This technique will work for any L6 car, but I haven't looked at any Z-cars later than '83 so I can't say for sure that you can get parts from a 300 ZX for an L6 type car. I know; you can go to a locksmith, you can go to the dealer, you can go to Pep-Boys and try to buy aftermarket locks, you can sell you car to an unsuspecting boob or you can get someone else to do it for you, but this is for those who don't want to do any of those things. But, judging by the reponse I got from my post a week ago, there are many of us who would just rather suffer and do it ourselves and recycle the junk at hand. Scenario 1. You have access to a parts car with one key that works all the locks and you want to make them work on your driver. Problem is the cars are different years, and the locks do not interchange. This makes no difference, as all you want from the parts car are the little brass sliders from the lock cylinders. 1. Remove locks from parts car. 2. Remove locks from driver.- 3. On driver and passenger doors, there may be a metal (stainless steel) plate on the face of the lock. This is what holds the lock together. It is bent over the outer cylinder of the lock at the edges. Carefully bend back the edges just enough so you can pry this stainless steel cover off the lock. I used a small electronics needle nose pliers for this. Be gentle, you can damage the soft metal cylinder doing this. You can also dent or otherwise deform the stainless cover. Remove the inner cylinder from the outer cylinder on both locks. 4. Note the little brass sliders in the inner cylinder. remove the little brass sliders from the inner cylinder of the lock that will be going on the driver. Now remove the sliders from the parts cylinder and put them in the slots on the driver. Note that they must go in in the same order/location in order for the key from the parts car to work on the driver. Also note the little springs in the cylinder (under the sliders, on the edge). Make sure you don't lose these and they they are in position before you insert the sliders. 5. Reassemble the lock. Lubricate the lock (for those in cold weather climates, use graphite type lock lube), test the operation of the lock. 6. Put stainless steel facing plate back on the lock. It helps if you have a small panavise (jewlers type vise with brass jaw option) to hold it together while you stake the outer lip of the face plate back around the outer lock cylinder. I used a small pin punch for a staking tool and little piece of 1" dia. aluminum scrap with a longitudinal hole on the backside of the lock so it wouldn't "walk" out of the vise. If you have messed up the edge of the outer lock cylinder when you took the faceplate off, you may have difficulty putting it back on. In that case use a jewelers file or dremel tool to smooth and reduce the thickness of he outer lock cylinder edge. Finally test the lock again for operation and reinstall it on the driver. 7. The ignition lock is a little harder. On my cars, there are security screws holding the lock to the steering column. I removed the steering column so I could have some room to work, and drill the heads of the security screws off so the lock could be removed from the column. You may not have to remove the steering column or the lock from the column to do this part, though. In fact, you may want to just move the whole ignition from one car to the other if you can and avoid the following disassembly procedure. If the locks won't swap out intact, read on: Again, you will need to remove the face plate from the lock. The facplate is that part that has the acc/lock/run/start around the keyhole. I simply used some curved jaw vice grips to rotate and pull off the face plate. With some finesse, this can be done without deforming or damaging the face plate. Depending on the year, you may or may not have some little gizmos just under the face plate which provide the key in ignition buzzer. Carefully remove these little plastic parts without breaking them. What you are going to do is slide out the inner workings of the lock from the outer housing. The inner workings are retained by a small sping loaded pin which can be seen from the side of the outer housing. You will see a very small hole with a pin in it. To release the inner working use a small pin punch to push this pin in, while try to pull the inner workings out with some needle nose pliers on one of the ears protruding from the inner housing. Be gentle as these are again very soft and fragile. Do this to both the driver and parts car. The idea is the same here, you want to replace the brass sliders on the lock your keeping with the sliders from the donor lock which you have a key for. Make sure the go in the same order as they are in the donor lock cylinder. As they say in the Haynes manuals, reassemble in reverse order! Scenario 2. What if you don't have a key that works in the parts car? What you can do is this. You will need to file down the inside edges of the sliders that are being pushed to far by the key. For the sliders that are not being pushed far engugh by the key, put a slider in that hasn't been filed down as much as the slider in that position. Use the donor car for spare silders. You also may be able to rearrange the order of the sliders you have on hand in order to get the proper size for the particular part of the key. This is trial and error, file - fit - file -fit, but no big deal really. Anyway, it is a good idea to have some extra sliders because, well, you might mess a few up! John Burgess Advanced Systems Administrator EDS Hi-Tech MIG Email: john.burgess@amd.com Voice: 512-602-3387 Pager: 888-582-8096