How to Replace Interior Door Handle 2013-18 Subaru Forester

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2014 Subaru Forester. I'm going to be showing you how to remove an inside door handle on the left-front door panel. It's going to be very easy. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts or instructional videos, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com.

All right, so here we go. We've got our door open. We're looking at our door panel. We're going to use a small pocket screwdriver, or whatever you happen to have. Something small. Right here, there's a little flappy door. I'm just going to grab this. Pop it open. Behind there, there's a Phillips-head screw located right there. Okay? So we're going to remove that using a Phillips-head screwdriver, turning it counter-clockwise of course. Grab our little screw out of there. That's what it looks like. You're going to use something like these. These are called trim tools. They're plastic, so you won't mar up any of your plastic door panel here. Feel along the bottom. Make sure you don't feel any screws or anything like that that go in and hold it to the door itself. Feels pretty good.

I'm just going to start along the bottom. I'm going to use my door panel tools here. See if I can find where the little clips are. There's one right about there. There we go. Feels like it's getting tighter up here. Okay. Over to this side, same thing. Feels pretty good. Okay. Just try shaking it around a little bit. Looks like it gets tight up here. All right. So while we're moving it around, feel like it's getting ready to come loose here. Try wiggling it. Feels as though there's something holding it in right here, so I'm just going to grab something and I'm going to try to pop this off real quick.

Okay, I've got my pocket screwdriver again. Right here there's a little slot. I'll show you it in a second here. Try to get that off. Right here is where I went, okay? Right in between there and here. It just pulls out these little tabs, okay? Now we're going to find two more Phillips-heads, one right there and one located down here. You can pick which one you want to remove first. You do you, boo-boo. One. Looks just like the first one. I'll grab this one. Number three, just like the other two. Cool beans. I'm going to grab our door panel, wiggle it around. It comes right up now. Behind here, there's going to be some wiring and some cables, so you just want to make sure you take a look and see what's going on before you go ahead and hang it, right? We're going to disconnect all we can. I'm going to take this white one right here. I'm going to try to remember the white goes up top. You can mark it if you need to, or whatever you need to do to remember. Or just watch the video to see how it was removed and just reinstall it that way.

Anyway, white one. Pull it. I'm going to take a peek. Just a little ball. Okay. Easy peasy. I'm going to go with the green. Just going to pull it out. Lift it. Let's keep on rolling. Down here there should be a little push clip right in the center. There's the push right there. Okay? That's where I pushed on. There's one right here. I'm going to try to push on that one. Here we are. Feel around the big one here. That one's probably on the other side. Let's see if I can find it. I'm going to try to use a little pick. I'm going to push in on the center right here. I'll show you where I'm pushing. Subaru was nice and they put it in the back where you can barely get to, but just push right there and that unlocks this little clip right here.

Okay? So now that we've got the door panel off, we're going to put it on someplace safe where it's not going to get all scuffed up and scraped in case we move it around. Right? I'm going to remove this Phillips-head screw and this Phillips-head screw, using my Phillips-head screwdriver. That's one. That's two. Both those screws look the same. We won't mess that up. Got a little plate here, okay? We'll set that stuff aside. Grab my small pocket screwdriver. There's a little clip right here and one right there. Okay? I'm just going to try to put a little pressure. They don't really hold it too tight, so I really didn't use the screwdriver. That's kinda nice. And now we've removed our inner door handle.

So here we go. We've got our door handle. We're just going to slide it right in like this. Line up our two holes. We've got our little clips here. So I'm just going to see if I can get it down and in. If it doesn't want to slide in, just grab your pocket screwdriver or whatever you happen to have, try to move the little clip. There we are. Those just kind of hold it in temporarily until we get our bolts in, right? We've got our little plate. This one says left-hand. Right? LH. Just slides right in. Got our two screws and our screwdriver. We're going to start them in, okay? Not going to tighten either of them down until I get both of them started. Very important. All right. Here we go. I'm just going to bottom it out. Here we are. We're just screwing into plastic here, so keep that in mind. You don't need to really reef down onto it. There we are. Now we can move along.

So here we go. We've got some electrical connectors here, right? We're going to go ahead and connect all these in and then we're going to move along. We're going to connect in that one down there, and of course we're going to put in our little cables, right? Very important. You don't want to leave these off, because...well, good luck getting in. Here we go. We've got one big one. It's going to go right down here on the bottom. Click. Got a couple other ones here. Click. This one right here goes up higher. Click. Easy peasy. Cool. We'll do that electrical connector in one second down there. Just hang it so it's ready to go. I'm going to do these while I'm up here, and then I'm just going to set the door panel inside its little thing so I can get down onto there, okay?

So we've got two cables. We've got our green cable. This one goes down to the handle, so I'm going to go ahead and slide it in. Then I'm going to lock it in to this little doohickey. Boom. Okay? Right here, the top one. This is the lock cable. Just goes in. Let's see if I can get it. Oops. Want to make sure the door's in the locked position here. Makes it easier to get the cable in. There we are. I'm going to lock it in. There we are. Perfect. I'm just going to take the door panel and I'm just going to set it up on here. Now I can let go for a second. We've got our cable right here, wiring harness. Just going to go into the little light. See if I can find it real quick. Yep. Okay. So right here, this is going to go right in, okay? Let me see if I can find it again. I'll show you. Right where I am, the lock goes facing up. Clicks in. Easy peasy. Everything's in there. Cool.

All right, before I go ahead and clip this in, I'm just going to test it real quick. So we're going to go ahead and unlock it. Now we're going to go ahead and lock it. That works perfect. Cool. So now we'll say that it's... Let's see, I'm going to go in, actually, because that's the door handle I'm going to be testing. So I'll go in and then I'm going to try and open the door. Cool. Now I'm going to try it again, but I'm going to lock it. Unlock. Perfect. All right, let's get this door panel mounted in. Make sure it goes down. No binding. Goes back up. Love it. Door locks. Great. Oh. There we are. It works. It works. So here we go, we're going to test the mirror. Left side mirror. Looks good. All right, now we can go ahead and put the door panel on.

So we'll make sure that the door panel's pulled down fully, right? We tested everything. We're good to go. We made sure we plugged in this light down here. Definitely on, nice and bright. Somebody put in an LED, that's cool. There's little holes inside the door panel, or the door itself. That's where the pins from the door panel are going to sit into, right? So you just take a peek. Make sure you got them looking like they're pretty lined up. Start at the top. Work your way around. Just give it a little bonk. Bonk bonk. That's my thing. There we are. Feels like maybe one more here. So we've got three screws. One here, there, and there. Right? So theoretically we should have three screws left, and we do. So we're going to go ahead and put these in. We're just going to start them in until we get all three started, okay? One screw, two, three. Okay? Just going to use our screwdriver. We're going to turn them in to the right. Like I said, I'm not going to tighten it down yet, until I get all three of them started in. It's very important, in case you need to shift the door panel around at all, line up the holes. Just going to help save you a little bit of time in the long run.

There we are. This was the last one, so I'm just going to snug it right up. That feels good. This one. Feels good. Last one. Feels good. Close our little door here. Nice. We're going to put this on. It's this right here. It's got this right here, okay? This goes down in there. Once it's in, you just line everything up and give it a little squeeze. All right, now if you wanted to, you can go ahead and clean it down, get off any fingerprints you might have put on there. Or leave them, whatever you did.

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