Thread: central locking

well it had to happen, the left hand doors have been crook for awhile no longer unlocking thought to myself will do something when drivers door plays up, and last weekend it did now to try and fix them or if that fails buy new ones

Many people assume that the actuators are solenoids; they are in fact motor-driven geared arrangements; there's a timer in the master actuator that applies power for 1 second to all the slave actuators, which in turn have a small electric motor that moves a rack via a series of plastic gears.
Actuators that do nothing at all have a dead motor. Actuators that try but don't always make it, have a stripped gear (the pinion gear on the motor is brass, all the rest are plastic. The first plastic gear in the series will be partially stripped).
If you can get one from column A and one from column B, and match a working motor to a non-stripped cog, you will have fixed you central locking.
A search should bring up a detailed post I made on how these work- no prizes for guessing how I learned.