Replacing a Side Mirror on a 1996 Ford Explorer: Removing Door Skin

Video Transcript

"Today we're changing a side view mirror on a 1996 Ford Explorer. In this step, I'm going to demonstrate the proper service procedure for removal of the door skin from the door frame. Now they make all sorts of fancy tools for removal of this stuff but a five way one of these guys you probably have laying around the garage, they work great for popping the little plastic Christmas trees out that they use to hold that door skin onto the door. Now what we have on it and the end you want to use is this end here as you can see it's forked or what they call bifurcated. The idea is what you're going to do is the Christmas trees is going to be sticking through like so and your going to slide that fork up on it and pop it out from the door skin with a lever action just like that. I'm going go ahead and start popping them off and there's going to be Christmas trees all over the exterior of this. Normally not on the top but around here there's going to be a whole bunch of them. You're going to pop all those off the door and slide it up and remove the skin from the super structure of the door. I'm going to go ahead and begin that process now. There's generally one located in the corner and that's a good spot to start. I take and slip my five way inside here and give it a pop. As you can see it's beginning to come loose. Now we're going to work our five way around and pop out all those little Christmas trees as we go. Just like so. You see we have this whole edge of the door loose. We're begin working around the bottom as well. Right there as you see once we pop them all off we had to actually lift up on the door. There's a little lip here that runs all the way along here that hangs the top portion of the door. Now that is the proper service for removing the door skin from the door frame itself."