'90 CQ hatch latch

[John Cunningham <johnc@together.net>]

ok this is a weird one.  while i have definitely solved the problem,  i
remain befuddled and consternated.  now soliciting any and all
enlightening anecdotes as well as half baked theories:

i discovered the other day when i popped the trunk and the alarm went
off, that my hatch did not seem to be locking with the rest of the car.
ok.  vacuum problems, right?  fine, delve into it later.  later is
today, and - not vacuum.  turns out that the lever that goes to the
vacuum servo (the 'central locking activator' in Bentley-speak) from the

latch button has been _pinned_in_place_ with a roll pin, so that the
hatch never locks with the rest of the car.

took me an hour or two to figure that out, and in fact, i only drilled
out the roll pin because i thought it was the pivot pin for that lever
and that i had to disassemble it because something else was jamming it
up.  *bing* low and behold, that's not the pivot pin, it's the damn
thing that is holding that lever from moving at all.

reassemble without the stupid roll pin and trunk locks/unlocks with
everything else as intended.  picture perfect, like ya read about.

so WTF is with that pin???  pater proposes maybe the mechanism is sold
this way for cars without central locking and somehow my car either got
the wrong one, or a lad didn't know to remove the pin before install.
sounds plausible, since without the pin and no servo in the car, it
would never open the hatch without the key.

i also think i find evidence of the lads hacking away at the mechanism,
so i suspect the original owner found it quite annoying to have to
either manually lock the lid everytime or to find the alarm going off
because it was unlocked and someone pushed the button.  naturally they
never figured it out either...

any other guesses?  TIA

JC

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John J Cunningham                     Project Managment & Analysis
802·985·8349                                   Information Systems
johnc@together.net                                           20vCQ
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