How to Replace Interior Door Handle 2006-12 Nissan Altima

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1AAuto. Today we're working on a 2010 Nissan Altima. We're going to be removing and replacing this door handle. It's going to be a very easy job. I'm going to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com.

So here we go. We're going to get inside this door panel so we can see what's going on in there. First thing I like to do is I like to get behind here, this is where the handle is. This is a little cover right here. It should just pop right up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a small screwdriver; I'm going to see if I can pry it up, pop it out. Okay. Behind here you'll notice there's a Phillips head screw, so I'm going to turn that to the left, remove that.

Then I'm going to come over here. I'm going to try to remove this little cover, or armrest, I should say. I'm going to use something plastic to try to pry, because I'm not trying to use something metal because I don't want to chisel up the rest of our door. So here we go. Phillips head right here. There we are. That's what it looks like. You can set that aside so we won't lose it. Take a look; there is nothing else back there that could hold this door panel on. So we'll move along.

We're going to take this off now. I'm going to use something like this. I'm going to come right here, and see if I can pry it up. It's pretty tight. I'm going nice and slow because there are clips under here that I don't want to break. If something breaks, well, you break it, you bought it, right? So I'm just going to go along. Once I get all this up I'll show you where all the clips are so you can see why I'm trying to take it slow. Let's see if I can grab it. There we are. It feels like maybe one more. There we are. Okay, so you can see we have all these slots right here and we've got all these clips. These clips are what was holding it in. This one was the main one and that one goes in here. That's why I was trying to start there first, get this undone, that way I can lift up, go along the line, and unclip all of these.

All right, we'll set this aside. Now we're going to take a look. We want to see what could be holding this plastic door panel onto the inner part of the door. It looks like we might have a screw here, a screw there. It looks like a Philips head or a 10 millimeter, depending on what you have access to. Since we already used a Phillips head, we're going to go with the assumption you have access to a Phillips head. I'm going to turn that to the left. This is a ratcheting screwdriver; it's wonderful. Electric screwdriver would be even nicer. I'm just going to pull this out; here we are. Grab that second one. Here we are. Same size as the other one. We don't have to worry about mixing those up, but they are quite a bit longer than this one.

Now what I'd like to try to do, let me see if I can pull up on this. If it doesn't feel like it wants to come up, we could even just try to take the door panel off first and try to take a peek behind there. There is going to be wiring, obviously. These are switches so they must have electrical current going to them or from them. Something to pay attention to as well is there is a light down here, which also means that it has electrical current getting to it. So there's going to be wiring here, there's going to be wiring here, so when we pull off this door panel, it's going to come off on the bottom this way and then up along the top there's a little ridge that it sits down onto. So when you get to the top, we're going to come popping, popping, pulling out, and then it's going to come out and up this way to come off.

All right, so I'm going to grab my little tool again. Use one that's a little thicker, one that's a little thinner; whatever you want to use. But I prefer to use plastic on this rather than metal just so I don't mess up my door panel too much. This one might not be in the best condition, but we'll just try to do it right. I'm going to try to come in. I'm going to try to pry away. See if I can find approximately ... All I'm trying to do is get in between the door and the panel. I'm going to turn my head around just so I can get my head down in here a little bit better.

Okay, so I can look down through here; I can see there's a clip. Here we are, there's one removed. I'm going to bring it down along here. Here we are, another one. Another one's right here. There we are. I'm just pretty much following the door panel around the door. This kind of tells me where all the little clips are. I'm going to come up this side; it feels like there should be one right about here somewhere. Here we are, we're bringing it up. Okay, here we go.

Pull this away, now we can see our wiring and our cables, so we want to make sure we disconnect all this stuff. We want to try to avoid any tugs on wiring. If you pull out any wires from any switches or harnesses, well, we're going to have bigger issues. And I can show you how to fix it all, but let's not do that today. Let's just get the part done that we're trying to do. I'm going to try to take a look under here, see if I can take this off real quick. I'm just using my small screwdriver. Okay, I've got a little electrical connector here. Let's see about pushing that in, lifting it up and out.

We're going to come in from behind here, and try to take a look at what we're dealing with. All right, we've got two cables. If you wanted to, you could mark them to try to remember which one's which, or you can just remember the top that comes out the top right here comes to the top up here. That's pretty easy to remember, so we'll just go with that. You could use something like a crayon. That just pops right out of there. There's a little lip right here, or a little ... Well, you can call it what you want. Think of what you want to call it, call it that. That slides into this hole right here. So if we were installing it, we would slide the little tip into that, hopefully. It's lubricated, so it's hard to hold on to. Basically it's slides right in there and then slides like that and it locks it in. And then if you wanted to lock it back in ... Okay?

But we're going to be installing it again later anyway, so here we go. I'm going to pull this one out as well. I'm trying to be careful not to break the latch. There we are. This one's a little bigger. No real nub, just a big old circle. Okay, now we've got the door panel. We're going to try to keep pulling it away, but not putting too much tug pressure on this. If you need more slack, you can go ahead and pull these little pins out of the door and try to give yourself more slack. I'm just going to deal with it the way that it is. This one right here, there's a little push pin. I'm going to try to push that in, pull this out.

Always check your electrical connectors. I'm going to skip saying it on every one, but I'm going to say it for this one. Check all your electrical connectors as you pull them off. Make sure there's no funny colors, green, blue, red, rust, anything like that. If there is, you're going to need to do something about it, okay?

Let's see, I'm going to try to find the prong on this one. Feels like it's probably on the backside. Here it is, right there. All I did was come around from the backside with my finger, squeeze on it, pull down. You can't really see that because it's in here, but it's very simple. You just grab it with your index, pop it out. This one, we'll take a look at it. How does it go in? Don't mind me; hitting my head. I'm going to try to push ... Let's see if I can see it. There we go. Can you see it better now? I can see it better now. Here's our little push. We're going to try to push that in, and pull out our electrical connector. So we can you use our small screwdriver if we want. Pull that out. Take a peek. It looks good.

So I like to just take a peek, just to make sure that everything matches up. If the door lock is over on this side, you probably just got the wrong handle. So it looks like it's good; it's the right color. Come in here. We'll just make sure our screw holes line up. We've got three screw holes. We've got the two spots. It looks good. So let's go ahead and remove these three screws. I'm using a Phillips head screwdriver, turning it to the left for all three. All three are the same, so that's nice. Here we are. Lift this up.

We have our old unit, just came out of a 2010 Nissan Altima. We have our new unit, quality 1A Auto part. We'll just look at them. We'll make sure that our mounting holes are the same. They are. They're both chrome. Awesome. I'm going to turn them right over so you can see the backside. As you can tell, everything looks the same there. You've got two mounting holes there for your little cables, two on the new one. So as you can tell, you have an exact quality match, so I don't see any reason why you shouldn't install this quality part. If you need this or any other part, you can always come down to 1A Auto and check us out.

So now it's time for our install. We've got our quality part, we've got our three mounting screws, they're all the same, so that's wonderful. Put them right here and grab our part. We're going to line up the three holes with the three holes there. They should just sit in nice. Let's see how we're looking. Pop in. Very nice. Those look like they're all lined up. We're going to take our three screws. We're just going to start them in by hand. We're not going to tighten any of them until all three of them are started. That's common practice for most anything that you're going to be fixing. Put that in there, so it's in going straight.

We're just going to be screwing into plastic, also, by the way, everybody, so you don't want to go too tight. Just get it started. Started. This is the last one. I bottomed out, and then I just gave it a little bit extra. Maybe you want to try to screw it in extra hard so you know it's not going to fall out. Well, it's just not going to fall out. Just go with that. Just bottom it out, and a little bit more. There we go. We'll just double check everything. We're going to turn it around real quick. It looks like everything's lined up. So now we've installed our handle.

These are all where our little prongs went into. You see anything that looks like this? This should be in the door. That just pulls right out. We'll check them all. So it looks like we've only got one in here still. We're going to take our door trim tool. Try it from whichever way you want, but essentially we just want to be able to pull that out. Let's see if I can get it. There we are. I'm going put this right inside our door panel. We'll find the one that it came out of, bottom corner. It's got a little thick opening here. That goes right there. So, I'll just try to slide it in. There we are. Make sure all these are still in. Okay, everybody looks good. Perfect. Let's get this up here.

We're going to make sure we take this wiring, we're going to put it down through this hole. That's where the little light's going to be. You don't want to forget that because it's going to be hard to get it back out some day. Now we can start connecting everything else if we want. We could do these up here or these down here. I'll start at the bottom and continue my way up to the top. So we've got the one for our window. There we are. The center one, that's the power for everything. I've got a little lock switch. Great. Actually, this one right here looks like it's for the window or the mirrors; left and right, blah, blah, blah. So there's that. That's what that one was. Perfect.

All right, so we've shaken it around. We're going to look back down here. This came out. I might have to put it back in again. Who knows? It just wants to be out, but we want it to be the way we put it. So just keep grabbing it. Keep giving it a tug, get it back out there. Obviously, you don't want to yank it right out of the thing. I'm going to try to hold it up against here. Now I'm going to grab our cables. Hopefully we remember which way they go. Top is on the top, bottom's on the bottom. So I got my bottom one. I'm going to go right inside this hole right here. We've got a round with a round hole. I'm going to put it in, go over, and I'm just going to push it in. Let's see if it'll go. There it is. Take our top one, bring it back around. We've got our little nub, that little nub goes inside that nub hole. Let's see if we can get it. There it is. I'm just going to get that into the slot.

I just want to make sure it's in all the way. If it isn't and it falls out, you'll have issues. So just take your time, make sure you do it right. I'm going to try to spin it. Sometimes they can be a little bit of a pain. There it is. Perfect. So we don't have any more wiring in here. We can look down in, we know we've got everything connected. We've still got our little wire hanging out the bottom. We've got little extra pieces. I'm just going to go like this. I'm going to start it in along the top. There's a little ridge that runs along here; that's going to sit inside this ridge right there. So once we get it sitting down on there, we can let go of our panel. Double check for our little wire; still there. It's looking good. Nice. And then we'll just go ahead and we'll take this and we'll bonk it in, going all the way around.

Double checking. We've got our wire down here. Looks good. I'm going to start at the top. I'm going to just keep going across like this; boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I'm going to go around, all right? I'm making sure that this is pressed down as far as I can go. Give it a little shake; it feels good. Very nice. We can go ahead and put it in our screws. We've got the short one there. We're going to have two long ones, one there and one there. I'm using my Phillips head, I'm turning these clockwise. If you wanted to, you could use a 10 millimeter. If you noticed that you were trying to tighten these down and for some reason the Phillips head kept sliding off or bouncing off or it seemed like it was stripping, you would want to make sure you used the 10 millimeter, but to help prevent your Phillips head from stripping, you can just press in at the same time.

Here we are, I've got my last one, the short one. We remember it goes in behind here, it can go that way, just go right up along the top. We'll go this way. There we are. Now before we go too far, we want to make sure we test everything, right? We don't want to put everything together and then have to take even more apart, but we do need to have all of this stuff in just to make sure that everything's secure enough to use. So now we're going to try the window. I got the key power on, so we can try going down a little bit, that seems pretty good, and go up; very nice. Go down, stop, up. Perfect.

I like to leave my window down when I'm working just in case I happen to close the door and it might be locked for some reason, I'm not going to lock myself out. So let's move along. I've got this little cover, it might go here, it doesn't go there, it goes over here. So we'll look at it real quick. We'll see ... We got a little tab right here. We got a little push tab right there. This one right here obviously isn't a push tab. It needs to go in first, and then push the backside in. So I'll just pull this away. I'm going to put it in that little slot right there. Just try to see if I can push this in. If it doesn't seem like it wants to click in, that's okay. There we are. That seems good.

So it's in there nice and flush. We can move along. We can go ahead and do our arm rest. We notice we've got all these holes going along here. That's where all these are going to clip into, going along the line. So I'm just going to take it, and I'll line it up. There we go. Let's see if I can get them all popped in. Looks like it needs to go a little bit more on the backside here. See if I can get it. I should have started with the back, so I'll just lift it back up. Let's see if I can get it started in. Something's going on with this little tab right there. If it doesn't seem like it wants to go in because the tab's bending out, it's very common. It's okay. We'll just use our small screwdriver again. It's a very handy tool. We'll push it in, push it in. I'm just going to come down the line.

So we've got our little connector. You can see where the little lock tab is. We've got our connection area over here. The lock tab goes on this side right here where my finger is, so I'm going to go ahead and line those up, clip it in. We've got a couple little tabs here and then we've got our under tabs, or whatever I'd guess you call them. These ones we'll slide in, but these need to go in first. So I'm going to go like this. There's a couple of little holes under here. I'm going to line up those tabs with my holes. I'm just going to lift it up, click it in. All right, door panel's on.

Now we've completed our job. Great job everybody.

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