Had a situation where I opened the rear hatch of my '87 T/A at a gas station and the soft touch close mechanism died so I was unable to fully close the rear hatch. With the glass hatch down, but loose/unlatched, I carefully drove the car SLOWLY about four miles to reach a Chevrolet dealer. It was at night and there was no traffic, so I was able to keep between 20 and 25 MPH with the hazards on. I think I almost reached 30 once, but slowed it right back down gently. The only time I heard any noise from the hatch was when I slowly pulled out of the gas station and the body maybe flexed allowing the rear of the hatch to make contact against the sides. The glass hatch never flew up and open, thankfully.

Did driving the car with the hatch like that hurt anything or place any excessive stress on any components or areas like the hinges, strut mounting points or sheet metal? Was this very bad or not a big deal?

 

At one point my hatch motor stopped working and had no choice but to drive with the hatch only held in place by a loose ziptie, hit speedbumps and all and had no damage whatsoever. You'll be fine

 

my pulldown doesnt work and my hatch is just latched not fully closed. i havent had any problems and have been 120mph+. i you will be fine

 

Cool, thanks guys!

 

I wouldn't recommend doing this.

Also, if you're too broke/cheap to fix the hatch, I seriously doubt the car's in good enough shape to safely reach that kind of speed.

 

You didn't do any damage. Remember that the 82-85 cars didn't have the automatic pull down feature and there are a ton of those cars out there without broken glass. Heck I've slammed the hatch on my old '86 pretty hard by accident and it didn't do any harm.

 

It'll be fine, the only thing I've noticed with open rear hatches is that on some cars exhaust gas gets sucked in.

 

educate me please how you can tell the condition of my car through the internet.

my car has a lot less problems than most people on this board, get off your high horse

 

My biggest concern was that heavy glass hatch moving somewhat freely might excessively stress or damage the hinges or fatigue the mounting area if any lateral forces tried to push the hatch side to side while in motion, if that makes sense? Perhaps the glass would shatter prior to that? Who knows?

I'd had that soft touch close repaired at a Buick dealer a couple weeks prior when I bought the car, and it started acting up again that night at a cruise-in. On the way home I stopped to fill the tank and opened the hatch to get out a bottle of Techron. That's when I could not close it. This time a switch component took a crap and the whole mechanism lost power. It was unrelated to the first repair. The tech at the Chevy dealer rigged the switch with a $120.00 ziptie that forces the broken internal connection back together, restoring power to the unit. Next spring I'm just replace that whole damn unit with a rebuilt one, and hopefully solve the problem for awhile.

 

The hatch is fairly strong.

Question, why didn't you try and repair it yourself? I doubt many of the guys working at the dealers have even SEEN a thirdgen before. They deal with mostly new cars.

Just buy the rebuild kit from TDS.
http://www.top-downsolutions.com/hatch-pull-down-items

He's got alot of upgraded parts that fix the weaker high wear rate items so you won't have to be fixing it again in 2 years.

 

There are people in this world who can look at something like that closing mechanism for the first time, sort out how it works, what’s wrong with it and fix it, or at least know how to apply “chewing gum & bailing wire” to the situation as a temporary solution. I’m am the opposite. I can screw ANYTHING up, and good. I lack the “handy” gene for sure. I’m to the point I can perform basic maintenance on my vehicles, but forget about something like this soft-touch closing unit. I did monkey around with it for about an hour before giving up. Since there was a GM dealer close by, it seemed like the best option at that moment.

The Chevy tech didn’t believe the car had the feature at first due to its vintage, but I showed it to him. Fortunately he had experience with these same units from when he worked as a Cadillac tech years prior. He was able to find the problem quickly. Unfortunately GM no longer supplied the bad part, but he was able to rig it with a ziptie as a temp solution. That’s how it remains. Now the motor is starting to have trouble lifting the hatch, so I want to replace the whole damn thing and start fresh.


Awesome! Thanks for this link. I was going to buy a remanufactured unit from Hawks. It’s good to have choices. If this one addresses the weaknesses of the original, that’s great. I’d love to have this feature functioning and not worry about it anymore.

 

Actually, the most serious thing you have to worry about is carbon monoxide getting in the drivers compartment. (exhaust)
With the shape of the body, it actually will pull the exhaust in as the wind goes by.