You have a 1998 ford explorer the drivers side door will not unlock and there is no tension on door handle how do you fix it?

Answer 1

The problem is a small broken spring inside the door latch assembly. With the broken spring, the door latch will intermittently fail to unlock. Unfortunately, the door latch assembly isn't made to be serviced, even though it's probably a 70 cent spring that fails. This is a terrible failure mode since even unlocking the door manually doesn't work.

The worst case scenario (like mine) is that the door cannot open at all. The exterior handle has no tension, the interior handle doesn't move, and the lock never unlocks. Don't try to force the interior handle, you'll break it off and cause yourself even more problems. After trying to get the door to unlock repeatedly, it finally unlocked for me.

Once the door is open, you need to take the interior door panel off the door and go to work taking the wiring connectors apart. Fortunately, the window track that's in the way comes out after removing one bolt. It's a bit of work to get all of the linkages and rods for the locking mechanisms and the interior door handle apart. After that, you need to get the door latch solenoid out from behind the bracket that holds it. At this point, you should be able to get the latch assembly out.