Keypad/Front Door Lock

[RVersOnline]

Wondering if anyone has experienced the issue whereby the front door lock mechanism (the one just below the door handle) has become "locked" while the door is "out" -- with the result it becomes impossible to close the front door. Neither the keypad nor the locking mechanism inside (just below the door handle) will open it. The latter will slide back and forth freely, but the door stays locked. The weather is fine, so we enjoy the fresh air -- but not sure we can travel in this mode! Chris is researching this for us at the moment, but apparently this was a new-to-him issue. Assuming we're able to get a fix, I'll post it here. But meantime if anyone else has found one, I'd appreciate learning about it.

[RVersOnline]

Wondering if anyone has experienced the issue whereby the front door lock mechanism (the one just below the door handle) has become "locked" while the door is "out" -- with the result it becomes impossible to close the front door. Neither the keypad nor the locking mechanism inside (just below the door handle) will open it. The latter will slide back and forth freely, but the door stays locked. The weather is fine, so we enjoy the fresh air -- but not sure we can travel in this mode! Chris is researching this for us at the moment, but apparently this was a new-to-him issue. Assuming we're able to get a fix, I'll post it here. But meantime if anyone else has found one, I'd appreciate learning about it.

[Dale777]

RVersOnline,

I had this problem also. Assuming the door locking mechanism is the same on your 2007 as it is on my 2006, then the fix is very straight forward. Remove the vinyl covered panel that covers the door locking mechanism; there are four screws attaching it. There are also two screws holding the deadbolt lock in place and two screws holding the black handled latch at the bottom.

Since this happened 6 months ago, I don't remember if you have to remove all these screws or not. Remove as many as necessary to expose the interior locking mechanism. Once the interior locking mechanism is exposed, its operation is fairly obvious. In my case, a screw had loosened, that allowed the locking mechanism to get "out of sync". Once I determined how all this "should" work, then fixing it was obvious. I would caution that you take pictures of everything as you take it apart so that you know how to reverse the process to put it back together. Also, be careful about losing any screws or allowing any parts to separate without first taking a picture of how they fit together. I make all these cautions, because the interior locking mechanism looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Good Luck

[RVersOnline]

As an update, I was able to reach Chris at Alpine Customer Support (on the first call!). He hadn't had this issue before, so went down to talk to the techs about a possible fix. As he was talking me through some steps, it suddenly unlocked -- and appears to work normally again. However, since we have a year-end warranty service scheduled at the factory in a few weeks, we've decided to use the key (deadbolt) lock until it can be checked out by the techs. We appreciated the helpful reply about disassembly of the mechanism -- and are grateful we didn't have to get that far into the system!