Hello

There is a very large class of people that own 65/66 Mustangs that, as far as I can tell, anyway, have been, for the most part, ignored entirely. They don't really want that 100 pt. show car that is so nice and was soooo expensive that they're afraid to drive it, they also don't want to make their car capable of achieving warp factor three. They just want this car that they dearly love to be able to cruise around smoothly and reliably, without having it dump them out on the side of the road or have it start making weird noises or belching out big clouds of funky-smelling smoke. And I think, truth be told, that this is by far the largest class of Mustang owners. They take their car to some technician when what they actually need is a mechanic, and this, frequently, does not work out very well at all for the owner. They don't want to re-engineer the entire car, they just want someone to fix what broke. These are the people that I am trying help out with this blog. Some problems require a little bit of back and forth, as in, "Try this." "I tried that and it didn't change anything."
" Oh. well, you probably need to try that." " I tried that and it helped, but it still isn't quite right." "Now you need to try this...." If you go to http://www.allfordmustangs.com/ and then go to the classics forums, you will be able to do that with a pretty hefty gathering of some very knowledgeable people that also happen to be very friendly. None of that ridiculous one-upmanship, no flaming or abuse, none of that stuff. Just good, solid advice from people that know what they are talking about.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Trunk lock cylinder replacement 1965 1966 Mustang

The first picture shows the trunk latch. Remove the two bolts holding it onto the trunk lid and it will basically fall off into your hand. Make sure that it is, in fact, your hand that it falls into, instead of letting it figure out a way to hit a painted surface.
This is a picture of what you will see when you get the trunk latch out of the way. Remove that nut with a socket wrench and pull the washer off with the nut. That will leave a split, funny looking tube thingy that is pinched onto the back side of the lock cylinder bezel. The split tube thingy will pull off of there.
The next two pictures are the entire assembly. The first is full assembled, minus that pesky trunk lid, and the second is everything disassembled.

This last picture shows the release button for the lock cylinder. You just depress that button with the key in the lock, turn the key a little bit so that the key won't come out of the cylinder when you pull on it, and pull the cylinder out. If the reason that you are replacing the cylinder is that you have no key for it, you can also take a very small flat-bladed screwdriver and get behind the cylinder with it and, with the button depressed, pop the cylinder out like that. The rod sticking out of the back of the bezel is a seperate piece that you will need to put back in before you install the new cylinder, or put your old cylinder back into your new bezel. Whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish here, drop the rod into the bezel, put the lock cylinder into the bezel, making sure that the tab on the end of the lock cylinder is lined up with the slot in the end of the rod, put the trunk lid gasket onto the bezel, put the bezel into hole in the trunk lid, put the split tube thingy onto the bezel from inside the trunk, put the washer and the nut on the bezel and snug up the nut. It doesn't need to be tight enough to have the bezel squash the gasket and crack the paint.


As a side note, if you have accidentally locked your keys in the trunk of the car, ( hey, it happens ) what you do is, on a coupe or a convertible remove the upper part of the back seat and take a half inch socket wrench with about 3 miles of extensions on it, and remove either the two bolts holding the trunk latch to the trunk lid or the two holding the the other part of the trunk latch to the taillight panel area, whichever you can get to the easiest. If you have a fastback, crawl through the trap door and do the same thing. You might have to remove that rear carpeted piece to get the trap door open, depending on how well the trap door is adjusted, which is usually not very well.

2 comments:

Steve Naranjo said...

This trunk lock replacement looks easy. What about a door lock? I'd love to replace my locks to use the original style "pony" keys that came with my deluxe interior package. A shop did my lock install and I only later learned that the key blanks for the pony keys are different than the stock keys. I'm apparently stuck with replacing the locks.

Veronica said...

The door lock cylinder replacement is not any more complicated, but, they are put together differently. I have a description of that here. http://thecareandfeedingofponies.blogspot.com/2008/04/door-latch-locks-and-handles.html The door key is the same key as the ignition, so, you would have to replace the ignition lock cylinder also if you want to just have two keys, but, replacing the ignition lock cylinder isn't a big deal, either.