I've never had door keys for my truck. The lock buttons were screwed down all the way so that the doors couldn't be locked from the inside, and I just left it that way due to lack of keys. I had intentions of buying a new lock set but yesterday I ran across a pair of door lock cylinders in my spare parts and I thought, "I wonder if I can re-key these myself?"
So I set about doing it. I watched a little YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNvFGOrAYQ) about rekeying a Ford ignition cylinder, and that seemed easy enough, so I set down at the bench with one of my door lock cylinders and some tools and scratch paper and a cup of coffee. Sure enough, with some fiddling, about a half-hour later I'd managed to rekey the cylinders to my existing ignition key. My spare door locks were a matched set (just didn't have a key), so they had the same pin configuration and I found a remixed combination of pins that worked just fine. Next step: install them in the truck.
My replacement lock cylinders had the levers with C-clips still attached to the ends, but they were for a Ford car and the lever was different than on my truck, so off came the clips and levers. Deciding to tackle the driver's side first, I removed the armrest, window crank, door panel, all that rigamarole, got inside the door, pulled the lock cylinder retaining clip, and slid the cylinder out of the door. I swapped the lever from the back of that cylinder to the "new" one, and installed it. Now I had to unthread the lock button a few turns so that it had some up and down action, but when I did that, I realized that there was no resistance in the mechanism- that is, when I pulled the lock button up (unlock) and let go, it dropped right back down to the lock position. So I got my flashlight and stuck my head in the door for a while, couldn't see much except that the linkage was connected correctly. I saw a little piece of a spring that looked like it wasn't doing anything, but I couldn't see enough of it to tell. At that point I decided to move on to the passenger's door so I could maybe use it as a comparison.
Before even taking apart the passenger side, I unthreaded the lock button and checked the action. It worked just as it should. Pulled all the junk off of the door, pulled the lock cylinder... what's this? No lever on the end of the lock cylinder. No lever! The lock cylinder was never connected to anything. Outstanding. I was hoping against hope that the lever had just dropped down in the door somewhere but my magnet picked up nothing but rust chunks. I had to drop everything, find a way to modify the newer style lever that I had to work with the truck's mechanism, put it all together, studied the lock a little so I could see why the driver's side wasn't working properly, then went BACK to the driver's side and finally found my problem: that stupid, itty bitty little spring that holds the lock button up: it's broken. Sheesh. At that point I'd spent, like, over an hour on this process that I thought would take 20 minutes, so I just called it good, buttoned everything back up, and ate lunch.
Now the passenger side works fine inside and out and my driver's door defaults to locked. That is, if you want to get in, you turn the key so that the lock button pops up, open the door, remove keys. If you want to get out, you lift up the lock button, pull the latch, let go of the button. When you shut the door, the lock button pops up briefly when the striker hits the latch, but then drops back down again, making sure that your keys are firmly locked inside.
Anyone wanna sell me that little spring?
I just unlock the pasengers door from the inside.
