Door lock actuators

When I bought Fessick, none of the power locks worked (as far as I knew). Meh, who cares?
When we got back from our first camping trip however, I couldn’t get into the hatch. I unloaded everything that would fit through the back doors and disassembled the hatch to get it open and finish unloading.
Apparently, one of my children (looking at you, youngest son) had pressed the 7 & 9 buttons and locked the hatch.

There were two door code cards in the owners manual, neither of them worked. I’ve since recycled those two cards. My local Ford dealer was kind enough to hook their diagnostic laptop up & ask the PATS system for the code, so now I had one working lock.
After doing some research, I found that some Ford lock actuators are repairable, so a buddy and I pulled one of mine apart. Sadly, the actuators in my door were not the repairable type. We buttoned up that door (but forgot to plug in the harness that signals the dome lights, unfortunately for my wife).
As I was going to have to buy parts, and the locks weren’t keeping the truck off the road, this repair got shelved until I had a bit of extra cash to throw at the truck (Turning parts into ca$h)
Back when I worked at Home Depot, I used to tell customers that any drunken idiot can post a “how-to” video on YouTube. Sometimes, I wish I could remember my own advice.
I watched a video on lock actuator replacement which made it look super simple. I figured I could get one done per day at lunch. That video skipped more than half the steps. On day one, I had to go back into work with a door that wouldn’t latch and had to partially re-install the latch after work so I could drive home.
I tried a second time before the thought crossed my mind that I might have bad directions. Found a second video, created by the folks at 1A Auto that showed me the missing steps. I found that trying to do a thing while watching a video was very difficult. Also, I didn’t like getting greasy fingers all over my phone. I wrote up the directions here so you can print them and toss the grease covered pages when you’re done.
The first one took about forty-five minutes, by the time I was done the fourth one, probably closer to twenty minutes.

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