The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

15 degrees

fixing a stuck open door with a ratchet strap


We had a strange problem with the Toyota this morning.

The doors opened okay, but something froze that prevented the passenger side back door from latching shut.

One option we considered was to wait and see if warming the car up would fix it, but time was an issue and I felt like this is the exact sort of problem ratchet straps were invented for.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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comment 1

Probably the latch mechanism on the door that mates with the pin on the car body got stuck in open position.

Usually a spray of light oil will free them up.

Comment by Chris — Sun Dec 23 18:21:00 2012
I had the same problem.
I had this problem a few years ago with a Hyundai Accent. We did the ratchet strap from door to door. Once the car warmed up the latch worked. The problem happened every time it got real cold after that so we just kept the strap in the car.
Comment by Dave — Fri Jan 11 18:24:36 2013
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