2013-18 Ram 1500 2500 3500 Tailgate Handle TRQ DHA64606

Hey friends, it's Len down here at 1A Auto. Today, we're going to be working on 2016 Ram 1500. It's going to be a fairly simple job. We're going to be doing a tailgate handle. If you need this part or any other part, you can always come down to 1AAuto.com and check us out.

So here we go. We're geared up. We've got our safety glasses on, gloves on. We're going to do a quick comparison just to make sure that we're dealing with the same part. We've got the keyhole, yes. We've got our little camera hole, yes. Got our little handle, handle. Nice. Looks good.

So we'll move on to the first step. Next what we want to do, we want to analyze our situation. We've got Torx bits, so we want to make sure that we have the right tool. What I'm going to be using, let's take a look. This is a T30 bit, so Torx bit 30, like a little star, kind of pretty. I'm just going to put it in. I'm going to make sure that it's turning to the left, counterclockwise, and I'm going to remove all these screws, which will let me remove this plate, and I'll get a clear view of what's going on, on the inside.

Oh, you're not supposed to see that. Got my ratchet here, did all eight bolts this way. Going to remove this, make sure we got our little washers that come with it. Put them all in a pile, can't lose them. Now we can go ahead and see if we can lift up this plate. Might be stuck in there pretty good, so we'll use something like a small pry bar or a small screwdriver, whatever we have access to. Let's see if this does it. Oh, yeah. Ta-da. So here we have the internals and this is where the fun starts.

Let's take a look at what we've got and what we're going to be using. So, what we're going to do is it's going to be very simple to get this apart, but first I want to try to remove this arm. I'm going to move it out of the way, so we can get to the two 8mm bolts down there. I'm just going to take my small screwdriver. Let me see if I can try to pry this away from the bar. I want to be careful not to poke myself with it. This can be a dangerous tool. Now that I've got the lock off, I can lift up this arm, slide it right out of the way. Okay.

We're going to use our 8mm with an extension and our ratchet. You can use whatever you have access to. This is just my preference. Some people have a little electric tool that you might've accidentally seen that they might like to use. I'm just going to remove those two bolts that are under there, which hold in the locking mechanism. I got a little magnet. If you have a magnet or a tool with a magnet, that's going to come in handy for you. I'm going to try to get it on this second bolt down there. Once again, this just to remove the locking mechanism. These screws are just screwed into plastic. Got that one. We'll check them. They're both the same. We don't have to worry about mixing those up. That's nice. Should be able to grab that locking mechanism. There it is. Throw that in the tra... no. Put it aside.

Next, we're going to come over to the camera side. If your vehicle has a camera, then it would be located over here. If it doesn't, well, don't worry about it. This one does, so it's my problem. Here we go. I'm going to use this tool. I have a T15 Torx bit 15. It's a little star-looking thing. I'm going to try to get it down in there. I'm going to remove the two bolts. There's one located right here, and if you can't find where the other one is, you can look at the piece we're going to be working with. So the one that I found is there. The next one is going to be all the way diagonal, okay, so that means that it'll be located some place down over here. We'll find that in a minute though.

I'm going to try doing this without the extension and just see if I can get my hand in there. If you wanted to, and this bar was in your way, you can repeat the process of removing this red tab, slide the bar up and out of your way. It's completely up to you. If it's in your way and you don't like it, you can go ahead and remove that. I'm not going to worry about it.

Okay. We'll get the screw. We'll match it up with the other one that came out, the exact same. Wonderful. We're going to grab our little camera lens, being very careful with it. There's our lens. If it looks dirty, go ahead and clean it up. Doesn't look too bad. I don't feel the need to have to remove this. If we did, we would just push in right there, pop it off, pop in the new one or the old one, whatever you're doing. For this video, I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to carefully put it away.

Next, I'm going to go ahead and remove these two 8mm nuts, one there. There's one located over here. All right. I'm holding onto our handle assembly so it doesn't fall and hit the ground, not that it matters if you're replacing it, right, but we'll just say we're removing it for who knows what reason and we don't want to damage it. Here it is, matches up with the other one. I'm going to grab it. I'll try to just finagle it a little bit.

If you're worried about not being able to see it, you can try to lift up the tailgate or whatever you have to do, but basically to remove it, I just kind of brought it down, and then what I had to do because is because this was catching on the inside of the door, or inside of the tailgate... sorry, I had to just turn it and then it slid right out. So now we'll just match it up. We have our old assembly and our new assembly. We're just going to take a look at them, make sure that they're both the same. We can match them up this way, looks good. Match them up this way, looks good. Match them up this way, yeah. Okay.

Come over here. You can see we have all the same mounting holes. Two there, two there. One two there. One two there. Looks good. We've got our studs. Beautiful. Just make sure that this works right. Yeah. Feels good. Spring tension's great. Generally speaking, if you're replacing this, it's probably because your handle doesn't do this anymore. It'll go up, but it doesn't come back down, or for some reason this part right here might've broken off on your old assembly. So what I would do in that case is come on down to 1A Auto and buy this part. So if you need this part or any other part, you can always come down to 1AAuto.com.

While we got this apart, I just wanted to show you couple spots that you want to look for. Basically, you want to look for rust in any areas that are going to be moving. So we've got this area; that's for your lock. Basically, when you flip your lock switch, it says "hey," and this thing moves and that flips the lock in which case makes it so your handle doesn't open. Okay. So if this is rusted, then your lock probably won't work.

Also, down here there's a spring area, this right here. Basically, if you could picture this as a shaft coming up through and this is supposed to pivot on that. You want to make sure that that can pivot because when you lift up on your handle, this piece right here is going to push and it's going to move stuff around in there. So you want to make sure everything can move around clearly or freely, I should say. If you see any rust, you might want to use a little bit of penetrant. Once you get it moving freely, you can go ahead and use a lubricant, maybe some kind of grease-type base thing. Can put that on there if you have any.

Okay. If we're looking at the tailgate, let's assume that it's up. It might be a little bit easier, but I got all my stuff up there still. We want to remember that the handle is going to lift in the upward way. Basically, we want to get this and this inside here first, so I'm just going to go like that. I'm going to try to twist it. Now that I've got it semi-in, I'm going to go in from the top and I'm going to analyze the situation, which looks it's we've got our little studs right here. That's where our two 8mm head nuts are going to go onto, so that should be good. See if I can get my fingers in there somehow, and that should be interesting.

Just going to get this lined it. You might need to do a little bit of wiggling. Getting your hand in here to try to get these nuts started might be interesting. I don't know how many times you've seen my takes on it, but this is time number two. We'll see if that started on. It's probably be easier without the ratchet on it. Looks like it started, take the ratchet off, go something like this. I'm going to hold it with my magnet, here we go. Get that nut started on there, just using the 8mm. Okay. I'm going to leave those loose. I'm going to put that down on the floor so I can find it later.

Now what I want to do is I want to check for when I pull on this handle, which is underneath right now. I don't know where the other one is. It's going to do this. We've got this all pivoting nice and smooth. If I had this bar on there, it's going to pull on both these latches, this one and that one on the far end. It's not going to do it right now over there because, but this is basically what it'll do. Woo-oo, woo-oo. Okay. So we know that's lined up.

When you install this, if you have this lever right here, this metal lever on the other side somehow, which is pretty much impossible, but maybe you can do it. Who knows. If it's on the other side, your handle's not going to work right. We know it works right. Let's go ahead and tighten those down a little bit. Grab my tool from my safe spot. I got it bottomed out. Going to leave it like that for now. Going to grab the other one. Okay, got it bottomed out. Now I'm just going to go a little bit more. That's it. Get the other one. I know it's a long handle ratchet. I don't want to go all the way down here and really rip on it. I just want to have it bottomed out, just give it a little bit more. That's it.

Okay. So now we've got our camera side and we've got our lock side over here. You can pick which one you want to do first. It's up to you. I'm going to come over here, left side. We've got our nice pretty camera. Okay. I'm going to get it down in here, see if I can line up where the holes on the camera are with the holes on the actual release lever assembly. Looks like I got. We got our little screws right here. We have our little socket, make sure it's still the right one. Nice.

Now what we're going to do is we're going to try getting both these screws in. Might seem impossible, maybe it is, but we're going to try. That's what we do. That's why we're here. Okay. I'm going to use my magnet again, holds onto it nice for me. I'm going to get my socket lined up into the hole and bring it down. I'm going to drop my socket because why not. Get my camera line back up. Try again. This is the fun part, right? Try, try, try.

Let's try again. Just going to get it lined up. Grab it again with my magnet. Basically, all I want the magnet to do is just kind of hold it for me because I can't get both hands in there right this second. So I got that one started. I'm going to grab my other one, put it on, magnetized. Nice. Okay. I'll see if I can find it under here. I'm going to go ahead and grab my flashlight so I can see under there a little better. I don't have x-ray eyes.

I got that turned in there a little bit, so both of them are started. I'm going to grab my 1/4" ratchet. I'm using a T15 like we used to take them out. Make sure it's in forward, yes, very good. I want to turn these bolts to the right. Okay. Got both these bottomed out, just going to give them a little tweak. There's one. Let's see if I can see the other one. There we go. Now I'm just screwing into plastic, so we don't need to go very tight. Okay. We don't want to strip out that plastic. Then we got to buy ourselves another handle or figure out another way to get them to stay in.

We're going to move on to the lock assembly. Then we're going to put our rod back in, and then we're going to give it a little try before we go ahead and put the panel back together. Okay. So to show you the lock assembly, it's got this little shaft right here. That little shaft is going to come up and go inside this loop right here. I'm not sure if you can see the loop or not, but the shaft should go up inside there. See if I can get it in. I'm going to show you the way it looks once it's in. There we go and like that. Okay.

So you can see where our shaft comes up through that loop right here. So now that we know that's in there and it's not out here or out there or anywhere else really, we're going to go ahead and put in our two bolts that mount it. Basically, I just want to try to get this screw started in. It's going to be a little difficult because we've got this handle in the way. It's just an 8mm head, so if you have a ratcheting wrench and you wanted to try that... looks like I got that started, or if you want to just try using your socket, could use that.

I'm just kind of holding everything with my magnet and I'm working it into the spot where I want it, and then I go ahead and tighten it down from there. So that helps me get it in. Even though I have skinny fingers, I'm going to say I have fat fingers in this instance because there's just really minimal room to do much work in here. I'm going to go ahead and try to get this on there. Got that top one in there snug. I'm going to go ahead and put in this bottom one. I'm going to go slow because we're just screwing into plastic here, so anything can happen when you're screwing into plastic. Looks like I got quite a bit more to go, so I'm going to keep going, going slow the whole time. Slow and steady hopefully wins the race. We're just screwing into plastic. Plastic can crack, can break, do all sort of funny things. Here we are, feels nice and snug. Take a peek. Perfect. All right.

So now we can grab our bar. We're going to go ahead and put it in right here, just slides into the hole and we're going to put this over, latch that in. Okay. We'll just double check, make sure we got everything that we put in nice and snug. We made sure we tightened up all the mounting bolts. That looks good. So now we'll get our stuff out of the way, and we'll hope that we can close this and reopen it with the latch. Lift it up. Ready. Yeah, haha. All right. That works. We've got our key, see if it works. I'm going to go this way. Unlock this way, nice. Unlock. Lock. Okay. Everything's still attached. We didn't hear anything come rattling around when we were opening and shutting things, so we know we didn't drop anything. Everything's mounted properly. Now we can go ahead and grab out eight bolts. We'll put them all in. We should be all set.

So we've got our plate. We want to try to match up our bolt holes. We've got two down here obviously. We've got one up here obviously. There were go. Let's say we took this off. We put it over here and brought it back over. We're putting it on. We've got our two bolt holes. Nice. We've got our other hole, doesn't line up with anything. Well, it's just because we put it on upside down. That's okay. Just take it... Aiya, Jackie Chan. Flip it over, line up all our holes.

So we've got all our bolts started in. I left a lot of them up, so that way there I can move this plate around if I have to. What will happen if you started tightening up the ones down there, by the time you got down here, who knows, it might be off a little bit. Don't try to line up the hole; it'll be almost impossible. Just keep them all a little loose. As soon as you get your last one in, you get it so it's started in, you know it's threading. You can go ahead and tighten that one up and then work your way back down all the rest. There we go. Checked them all. We know that we tightened all the way down the line.

We'll get all our tools out of the way. We'll give it one last try, and we'll send it on its way. Works. Lock it. Yeah, lock works. Unlock, works. Out with the old, in with the new. Great job everybody.

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