Do It Yourself - Coupe Owners: Repairing a Floppy Hatch Latch

[Junkman2008]

From the escapades of the Junkman, I bring to you another solution to a annoyance.

The rear latch on my targa roof somehow lost its springiness. It still latched just fine and worked, however, when I would go to put the roof back on the car, the latch would close before I could get the roof in place leaving me holding the roof with one arm, and trying to undo the latch with my other arm so that I could put it on the car. This was a VERY awkward situation and I was taking a chance at dropping the roof and damaging it and the car. Thus, I finally decided to dive into the thing and try and figure out how it worked. Turns out, it was a simple fix to a annoying problem. Let's dive in! :thumbsup:

Step 1 - Remove the 2 Phillips screws from the front of the cover.



Step 2 - Look at the picture below for clarification on removing the latch cover. It is now being held on by 2 clips. Carefully slip a large flathead screwdriver under the cover toward its rear and turn the blade to pop the cover up. The clips should pop out of their seats. You'll do this on both sides of the cover.



Step 3 - Once I removed the cover, this is what I saw. DO NOT insert it into anything yet.



Step 4 - You need to remove these 2 10mm bolts next.



Step 5 - Now here's what we have to accomplish. First, read this entire step BEFORE you do anything. Those of you who don't will be kicking yourselves in the butt for not doing so later.

You need to LOOSELY insert the shaft that has fallen out into the handle so that it looks like the picture below:



Your goal will be to turn the shaft with the spring on it just enough to put some solid tension on the spring leg (the turn will be clockwise). BE CAREFUL not to turn the shaft too far or you will screw up the spring. Once you do that, a simple free fix turns into a $145.44 repair - the cost of a new latch (because it only comes as a unit).

The more tension you put on the spring, the more "knuckle busting power" that latch will have. Us Coupe owners know first hand what happens when you go to unlatch the rear latch and it swings down and cracks your knuckles. I don't know to many guys who have been careless enough to experience that more than a few times.

You may have to open the end of the shaft up a tad so that you can get a screwdriver in the slot in order to slightly turn it. Make sure that you crimp it back down or the spring will fall out later! See picture below:



Once you put enough tension on the spring, push the shaft into the handle and give it a couple of taps with a small hammer so that it stays seated. One good thing about this is the other side of the latch has this same shaft in it so if you somehow screw up the end of the one with the spring in it, you can always swap the two. :thumbsup:

Put the assembly back together. Realize that the feel of your latch may change. It may be tighter as mine seemed (not that this is bad or anything...).

One thing that I realized is that you can adjust how much grab the latch has. If you look at the following picture, you can see that the hook can be rotated so that it has more or less grab. Thus, if yours is too loose or too tight, that problem can be remedied. Once you get it adjusted right, a teeny, weeny amount of Lock-tite may be needed to keep it from turning over time.



You now have saved yourself some dead presidents and your latch is now working. I searched long and hard for this information and couldn't find anything so I hope this helps someone. One thing I can advise you about how to avoid having this failure in the first place is to never allow stuff in the hatch area to slide around and bang up against the latch. That's what caused mine to come apart to begin with. :lookinup:

The Junkman