I just posted my treatise on the closing assist pump in the stickied...

[Brett San Diego]

"knowledge base" thread. It's very verbose and very, very long, but I wanted to give even the least mechanically inclined of us lots of clear explanation so that anyone could understand and tackle the system.

The pics are posted on a temporary hosting site (www.tinypic.com). They will disappear after either 10,000 downloadings or 3 months of inactivity. So they will eventually disappear. I don't have a web site to permanently put this up. I should learn how to set one up. So, I welcome anyone to take this and post in on their web site (pcmaher?). I'd like to keep a little credit, however. :)

This can be a living document. If others will inform me of their problems with their closing assist systems and hopefully solutions too, I'll update it as I learn more.

Happy DIYing.

Brett

[posix]

mine is still working beautifully, btw. timing still at around 1 sec. not a single malfunction. it even saved my bacon the other day. the door somehow unlatched itself at around 30mph mid-corner. I just barely noticed it (as my arm was leaned conveniently against the window sill) and the pump pulled the door back, just before my blood pressure had a chance to jump to somewhere around 190/120 or thereabouts. Then a huge grin on my face confirmed the pump must be doing its job properly.

I still cannot figure out why the door unlatched mid-corner. Perhaps it doesn't like an arm resting on the door frame? This is the second time this happened to me and the first time that the system worked as designed. I also remembered my friend once telling me this was one of the reasons for implementing the close-assist mechanism - i.e. to pull the door back in in case it unlatched during driving.