The other day, as I opened my driver's sile door, this metal wire clip/spring thingy fell off. You could feel it with you fingers on the underside of the door handle before it fell off. It's about five or six inches long and is made of thick wire.

So I'm wondering what this thing does, or if I need to figure out how to put it back on. It does not look like it is broken, it just seems to have come undone.

It looks like some sort of anti-rattle device, but doesn't seem to have affected the functionality of the latch or anything else.

Any thoughts?

 

It just springs the handle back into the door no biggie but it does get annouying when your handle sticks out...same thing happened to my friends explorer.

 

Thanks for the reply, I guess gravity is taking care of keeping it from sticking out right now. I might try to put it back on to minimize the rattling.

 

Holy crap! That happened to me about a year ago. I thought I broke my door handle at first, but then when I tested it out it seemed to work perfectly as usual, so I decided not to try to reattach it. Hopefully gravity will be on my side in the future too!

 

Both of mine fell off a year ago and I never bothered to figure out how to put them back on. My doors open, close, and lock, so I don't care.

 

my passenger door just did that 2 weeks ago. everything functions fine so i'm not going to bother w/ it. i keep the spring in the car so i won't lose it incase something doesn't work in the furture.