20. Out of Doors

A minor pain in the ass about driving a US model Ford V8 older than 1941 is that they don't have an outside door lock on the driver's side door. My method to secure the vehicle is to walk around to the passenger side, open the door, reach across the seat and push the rear of the driver's side inside door handle upward, which locks the door. Then I close the passenger side door and lock it with the key.

On my car, if the inside handle on the passenger side door is in the up and locked position when the door is locked from the outside, the key will not unlock the door. I don't know if all early V8s are like that, but mine is.

The first time I locked myself out, I broke the passenger side quarter window and used a stick to push the inside door handle down to unlock the door. It was time to remove the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute window decal anyway, but replacing the window cost more than I wanted to spend and I was picking glass out of the passenger compartment for months afterward.

When I found myself on the outside again, I opened the trunk with my key and crawled in. I broke through the paperboard divider between the trunk and the passenger compartment, pushed the seat back up and reached through far enough to push the handle down.

I never locked myself out of the car again. That was my wife Suzanne's job. She left the handle pushed up when I parked the car during a massive cruise night in Golden, Colorado. So when I couldn't unlock the door, I once again opened the trunk and crawled in. I found that it was a lot more difficult than it had been twenty years before. A small crowd gathered to see where the grunts and groans were coming from. They stayed to see what was going on. When only my feet were sticking out of the trunk, Suzanne said "And if he keeps misbehaving, I'll put him in there again."

Incidentally, Bob Drake sells a kit to add a lock to the driver's side door. It includes both door latch mechanisms,  2 lock cylinders keyed alike and a left hand lock cylinder mount. I have the kit in hand, as yet uninstalled.