When I bought my '94 4-door Sidekick, the tail gate door handle was broken. Not really surprising as the stock piece is made of plastic and takes significant force to lever the mechanism open. Well, I went on eBay and lo and behold there were quite a few new handles listed for my vehicle for $22 shipped. Here's an example:
Tail gate handle
I was somewhat disappointed when it arrived as it is quite different in design from the stock handle. The stock part is basically an "awning" that houses the license plate lights with a small plastic handle bolted on separately inside the "awning". The replacement , on the other hand, incorporates the moving handle as part of the "awning" itself, is smaller in overall size (so the older marks in the paint showed) and worst of all has no accommodation for the license plate lights and so is not a legal replacement. When I brought that up with the seller they said they'd refund my purchase if I shipped it back, shipping on my dime. Considering the shipping would have been 3/4 of the cost and I needed a rear handle, I kept it and installed it sans license plate lights. I took the leftover stock parts and saved them in a box.
The replacement handle lasted all of ONE MONTH before the handle broke. At that point I was very glad that I had kept the stock parts. I certainly didn't want another one of the crappy eBay replacements and although the stock handle seems to still be available for around $30 I didn't really want to use it either for a couple of reasons. One is that there is no dealership within a couple hours of me and I didn't want to wait for it to arrive to have a working tail gate. The other is that I didn't really feel like installing more crappy plastic replacement parts. I pulled some 1/4" thick steel flat stock, bent it, cut it, welded it, ground the welds and painted it to make my own solid steel replacement handle which will still be working long after the rest of the vehicle is scrap.
It works perfectly.
FWIW, I'm not interested in making and selling any of them. I just wanted to rub it in a little.
Sidekick Rear Door Handle - Permanent Solution
Linear Mode
