Chevrolet Silverado, Suburban & Tahoe Exterior Door Handle Fix
Repairing the door handle on your Chevrolet truck or SUV is simple and inexpensive.
The GMT900 family of vehicles includes the Chevrolet Silverado, Tahoe, Suburban and Avalanche as well as the comparable vehicles from GMC and Cadillac. Offered from 2007 through 2013, all of these vehicles were very popular, but they many of them share a common issue. The exterior door handles break where they connect to the body, making them hard to while also looking terrible. In some cases, people have been lucky enough to have the problem fixed under warranty, but with so many of these vehicles being beyond their warranty periods, the burden of addressing the broken door handles falls on the owners.
Fortunately, forum member “lotexigeus” put together a do-it-yourself write-up showing how simple it is to fix this problem and best of all, it doesn’t require any special tools or any real mechanical expertise.
Removing the Handle
When the OP first introduced us to his DIY thread, in which he details how he fixed his 2008 Chevrolet Tahoe LTZ, he starts by sharing a YouTube video that shows how to properly remove the inner door panel. Then, the DIY thread takes over.
Once the inner door panel is removed and the water guard has been pulled out of the way, you are just about ready to remove the door handle
. The piece is held to the door with two 10-millimeter bolts and if you are performing this project, the odds are good that one of these two bolts is broken out of the housing. To remove that one, you will have to put your hand up inside of the door and hold the plastic piece while unscrewing the bolt, but once that is off and the other side is loose, you can almost pull the handle away from the body.
The final step to remove the handle of your Chevrolet GMT900 truck or SUV is to address the door handle rod. The OP in this DIY disconnected it from the latch assembly and pulled the whole thing up out of the door, but in some cases, you can disconnect the rod from the handle and leave the metal connector in the door while only removing the broken plastic handle assembly.
Fixing the Handle
Once you have the handle off of the vehicle, the problem is easy to see. In almost every case, the threaded portion of the assembly has broken free of the handle itself, so it no longer holds the assembly against the body of the Chevrolet GMT900 vehicle.
To fix this, the OP used super glue to situate the plastic in its original position and once it was dry, he built up the outside of the plastic bolt housing with a serious amount of epoxy.
It should be noted that the easier way to fix this problem is to buy a new handle, but the new handles with the similar thread design is just as likely to break, so if your handles are in good shape, it makes more sense to reinforce and reuse them.
After the handle assembly has been glued back together and reinforced with the epoxy, giving everything a day or so to dry, you can put everything back together. Start by reconnecting the door latch rod and bolting the handle back to the vehicle with the 10-millimeter bolts while being careful not to overtighten them, as that can cause the handles to break free.
Once your handle is bolted in and hooked back up, you can reinstall the water guard and the interior door panel to finish up the project.
The OP ends the DIY thread with a link to another, longer thread with information on this problem, including PDF files with diagrams of how to fix the problem, but this DIY does just as good a job as the elaborate technical bulletin.
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