TeamSwift

The driver's side door gets the most traffic out of all the doors on your car and so does the normally closed switch switch inside the door frame.


This switch serves an important funtion of activating the dome light, and door ajar buzzer. If inoperative or malfunctioning sometimes when you close the door you have to give it an extra firm pull-in from the secure handle to get the buzzer or dome light to stop. At least this was my problem. I salvaged a switch from a 95 or newer geometro from the wreckers. I broke the driver's side switch at the wreckers so learning from my experience I carefully removed the passengers side switch with little effort. This guide assumes you have in your possesion a replacement switch with a long enough wire on it. As well the driver's side seat was removed for easier access.




Start off by opening your door and removing the plastic trim behind the seatbelt. This will expose the wire on the backside of the switch. Now, facing the switch carefully pull up the top and bottom halves of the soft rubber boot from under the lip. Now becareful as there are tiny plastic hooks on each side of the center of the switch.

Take a flat head screwdriver and pry out the rubber from under the hooks and do not pull the rubber boot straight off as the hooks will break!

A: this is the ground for the switch connected to the chassis by the screw; D . B: this is the little hook I was talking about. C: is the pushbutton switch.


Go to the inside of the car and cut the wire, but cut it far enough in order to have enough to connect with the new wire. Now remove the screw holding in the switch, and pull out the old switch.


Install the new switch, with the screw and the rubber protective boot. Get out your soldering gun and solder, with a small piece of heatshrink tubing over the bottom wire and pushed out of the way. I do not advise using a crimp connector as this is something we don't want to have to go back and fix again because it rattled loose. Solder the two wires together and then test the switch with the dome light selector in the middle position. Point B is the finished solder with applied heat-shrink tubing. Point A is advising you to make sure that this metal lead does not touch the chassis either, so make sure it's clearly bent down from making contact.


Some notes: if you just want to bypass/disable the switch the just cut the wire and put some electrical tape over the end and re-install the plastic trim cover.
I tested the old switch with a the ohm/continuity setting on my multimeter and discovered it did not work perfectly. Replacing with the new switch fixed my problem.

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1995 Firefly 1.3 SOHC 8VALVE MANUAL
2000 Firefly 1.3 SOHC 16VALVE AUTO. Goals: full restoration, achieve stock MPG and HP or higher, finished look should be 'stealthy' and unassuming. Engine will need to be rebuilt later on to restore compression levels.