How to Remove a Car Door Panel

Video Transcript

"How to remove a car door panel. There are many different styles of door panel and many different ways that they're attached, but there are some commonalities among them all, and we're going to try and cover those. Generally speaking the first thing you need to do if you are removing a door panel is you need to remove any items that might be holding the door panel to the door that are not clearly visible right off the bat. They might be arm rest, the door latch. There might be screws or clips that need to be removed before it can be taken off. In the case of this vehicle, the door latch and the arm rest need to be removed. The door latch is removed with a single screw. We'll just take that out. And then the door latch comes out, and then we can take a pair of pliers and just unclip it like so. And we'll set that aside. The door handle is held in with three allen cap screws. There are little holes underneath for access via the wrench. The rearmost screw needs to be removed completely. The other two just need to be loosened. Those loose, and now we carefully pop the handle off and the control panel might come out. Oh, didn't quite get this one all the way. There we go. So the door handle is off. Now it's a good idea to carefully disconnect any electronics. You want to make sure you don't break any tabs or connectors because then you'll have trouble when you go to reassemble it, usually a gentle rocking motion and they'll come right off. Some of them, you'll need to take a screw driver or the like and just open the clip up slightly. So now we've got two brackets that are holding the door panel in place. we'll remove those with a screw driver. Now this particular door panel has plastic tabs that hook down into the steel part of the door. So to remove the panel at this point all we need to do is carefully lift up on it to disconnect, disengage those tabs. You don't want to pull out on it or you might break them off. So you just kind of want to work it and wiggle it until it comes off. And then you want to feed your wires through the panel holes and the door panel is off."