Tailgate Wont Stay Shut How to Fix a Stubborn Truck Tailgate

So, your tailgate doesn't close, that's what we're going to talk about in this video.

When you notice the tailgate's not closing, the first thing you want to look at is see if there's any debris in the way, if there's anything you left that's going to cause the gate to not close properly. Another thing you want to think about if you have a painted bedliner, then sometimes this will cause the tailgate to push out a little more and that can cause it to not close properly. So, sometimes this needs to be trimmed a little more. In our case, if we push it, it closes and that's fine, but without even touching the handle, I can just pull it open. And that shouldn't be the case.

There's a few things that could be causing this. The first, we're going to check out the latch. Just take a Phillips head screwdriver and just try to latch the latch and see if it will actually stay down. And it seems like this one's staying down. That's what you want to happen. And then when you pull the handle, it releases. Now, if we check the other side, this one is actually not latching. So, in your head, you would assume, "Okay, it's a bad latch." But before you decide to replace the latch, check out one more thing. Let's check out the handle. I'm gonna pull this cover off. Just use a trim tool. All the trucks are a little bit different. And a lot of times, there's going to be rods that go from the handle to the latch. And a lot of times these rods, the pivots on the handle will actually be frozen. So, what we can do is take these lock rods off.

This is the rod that goes to the latch. Slide those off. And then check and see if these are frozen. It seems like they're a little bit frozen. All right. So, those are disconnected. Let's see how this closes. So that closes a lot better. And then pull on the rods, it should open. And there it closes. It is a little loose. There is a rubber grommet that's missing here, but if I grab the tailgate, it's latched real good. So, those latches appear to be working. Now, if I want to unlatch it, take these two rods and then just push them together. And that releases the latches. So, you can see it better, I'm going to pull this handle out so we can look at it.

Here's what the handle looks like when it's out of the tailgate. And there's a pivot right here. And that's where you get some of the corrosion so that when you open the handle, these two arms move in, they're supposed to very easily move back and they kind of bind up a little bit, and sometimes you'll find these completely frozen. When these are completely frozen, you're gonna need to replace the tailgate handle. At this point, we can try to lubricate this and see if we can get a little more time out of this one. We'll just take some silicone lubricant or you can take some rust penetrant. See if you can get it to loosen up a little bit. Let me just try to work it in. For the most part, once this starts happening, it's too late. You're going to have to replace the handle. But if you did this regularly, you can potentially prevent this from happening. If when you're doing your oil changes and lubricating your door hinges anyway, if you lubricate this, then you'll prolong the life of this and not have to replace this sooner than later.

All right. So, it's a little bit looser. So, let's put it back together and see how we did. I'm gonna hook these rods back up. And before I put that trim up, I just wanna try it. That's a lot better than it was. It's still loose and that's okay, that's just because of this bumper. There should be a little rubber stopper there. There's one on this side, just like that. So, this is going to work for us temporarily. Eventually, we're going to have to replace the handle, but it'll get us by for a little bit. If the handle wasn't your problem, it could have been one of these latches that are binding up and you can check them side to side. Just like we did earlier with the screwdriver, check it and just make sure it holds tight. And replace those accordingly. Or you may have to make an adjustment to the pin that the latch actually attaches to. If it's too far in and the latch cannot grab onto it, you might have to pull it out a little bit.

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