How to Replace Front Outside Door Handle 1998-2011 Mercury Grand Marquis

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet.

Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to remove and replace an outside door handle on this 2000 Mercury Grand Marquis, same as pretty much any of these Grand Marquis as well as same as the Ford Crown Victoria. The only differences might be in how you remove the door panel. Tools you'll need are flat blade screwdriver, a Phillips screwdriver, a hammer and punch, a drill with a 3/8 inch drill bit, and a flashlight.

Start with a flat blade screwdriver and carefully pry up on your switch panel here in the front. Then we just pull back and forth and pull up with this hand and just shaking it back and forth. It comes up and out and then again with your flat blade screwdriver pry up here and take off your mirror switch, and then make sure you can move these connectors. Then there's just little tabs that lock them on. Remove that one and pry up on the other side. Pry out down here and pull out on this connector, and get it started, and pull up with my finger on this one, and we'll put it there.

Just carefully go in and there are these little caps. Pry that one out. If you go in from the bottom and you do scratch something it's more difficult to see. Then right here, put your screwdriver in up top, you can actually see a little space where the screwdriver goes and pry this bezel out. Now there are five Phillips screws to remove: one there, one there and there, one right there, and then one right down here at the bottom. Now I'm going to fast forward as I remove those five screws. They're obviously easy to remove because they're just screws, but they do and try to stay in there, so as you're pulling them out or as you're turning them counterclockwise, you might have to reach in with your fingernail and pull them out. Otherwise, just make sure that, if you can't get them out of the panel, just make sure that when you pull the panel off, if you drop them, you just recover them before you go to the next step.

Once you have those screws out, then you just lift up on the panel and bring it out. On the backside, there are two connectors. Pull back on a couple of tabs here and disconnect that. Then pull up on this tab, and disconnect that, and your door panel comes off. Carefully pull your water shield up.

You're going to come in here and up there is the back of your door handle. You can see it's riveted in, so what you want to do is right down here, you can see the clip. You can actually grab it on the other side, open up this clip and pull out your door latch rod.

Now on the outside, you're going to want to punch. Use a punch just like this and underneath the handle you'll see there are two rivets. You want to take your punch and punch out the center of those rivets. Now you can see the rivets with the centers knocked out. Now take a 3/8"� drill bit and slowly drill away the rivet. You basically know when you've gone far enough when the rivet comes off as a little ring and just sticks onto the end of your drill. Now take a screwdriver or something larger and you want to punch out the rest of the rivet. You can see the handle comes loose. Pull it down and right here is your lock. You need to . the lock has a little hook so you just jiggle it down a little bit and unhook it. Just use our screwdriver for this little piece of rivet right there. I'm going to retrieve my lock rod up in.

Here's a new handle from 1A Auto. Now you saw my old handle really wasn't broken but I'm going to install this new one anyways. You can see the nice chrome finish. It will fix the problem if you have a broken handle. The first thing you'll want to do is put the latch rod back on, hook it in place and put the handle in. You have to work the handle up. Put the handle in first and up and in place. Then take a couple of short screws and put them in place, hold those in place, and, on the backside, put a washer on and then a nut. I'll speed it up here. I'm just using a short bolts and washers and lock nuts in place of the rivets. Obviously if you had a rivet gun and the correct size rivets you could use those. I'm holding the backside with a wrench and tightening it up. The front one, again, I'm just holding the backside of the screw or the nut with a wrench and tightening it up.

We're going to go in here and there's our latch rod, make sure you open this right up. Now push the rod up as high as it goes and then push it into place. Then push our clip back on. Make sure that's unlocked, close it, and open it.

Now just put your water shield back in place. You can I just use a little tape to hold it up out of the way while I was working. Your door panel is designed with hooks on the bottom. You want to lift up your harnesses and you can see that the bottom hooks clip on, and you can put in your trunk opener. Plug that in, plug this upper plug in, lift your door panel up. Lift your door panel up, make sure that these harnesses are coming up through and then make sure your door lock comes through, lift the panel up a little bit and then it slides right down on.

I'm going to speed it up here as I put the five Phillips screws back in. The long ones go through the panel. The shorter ones go through that door pull. Just another tip, if you have trouble getting one in, you might want to take the panel back off and, on some of them, there's clips in behind and sometimes those clips can get shifted which makes it hard to get the screws in but they should pretty much go right in. Reconnect your harness leads and our mirror switch, and then just work this right down in, push it against the door and down in. This goes right in and locks in place, and these go back in place.

We hope this video helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Please feel free to call us toll-free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the Internet and in person.