How to Clean & Lubricate Your Lift Gate Latch

Video Transcript

Today we're changing a rear latch on a 96 Ford Explorer. In this step I'm going to demonstrate the proper procedure for cleaning up and reassembling of our latch mechanism. Now if you purchased a new latch you don't necessarily need to do this step. But we got a used one just to save some money. As you can see inside the mechanism it's all crusty and nasty and dirty. We're going to take some brake clean and a wire brush and take and clean out the mechanism as good as we can. This is really your one shot to prep this and try and get as much life out of it as possible. So we're going to take our brake clean and spray down inside the mechanism. Just like so. We're going to give it a second to sit and take and chew on that grime and break it down. Once we let it sit we're going to take and use our wire brush and clean up all the contacts as good as we can and we're going to use some heavy duty silicone spray to lubricate it. We're going to wait and let this brake clean totally dry out and then continue cleaning it. Now that we've let it sit and completely dry what we're going to do is take our wire brush and clean off as much of the moving parts as we can. And there we go. As you can see we got a significant amount of stuff off of the operating portions of the latch. I'm going to take and latch it all the way down and clean this side a little bit. I'm going to click the release mechanism right there and I'm going to go ahead and clean the other side as well right there. From here what we're going to do is take and spray a significant amount of heavy duty silicone into the mechanism. We're going to now take and operate the levers to work that silicone into the places where it needs to be. You can see how working it back and forth that silicone is going to take and clean up the pivot points and sink in and lubricate all the places that are touching each other that will drag and cause the latch to malfunction. From here what we're going to do is we're going to take and reinstall our release rod. Release rod inserts just like so. You're going to rotate it into position. That is the proper service procedure for cleaning and lubricating your replacement latch and reassembling your release rod.

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