Dead battery / Locked hood…hmmm

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Wan Chi Lau in RainyDayGarage // 0 Comments

Ever run into a problem that you had solved before, only to realized that while you remember “in general” how you solved it, you have forgotten the critical bits of how it was done???

Well, we just spent the last two hours trying to “re-figure out” how to pop the Boxster’s hood to get at a dead battery.

After not running the car for two weeks while it sat in sub-freezing temp…of course the battery was dead! While we expected as much and knew that the RainyDayGarage had the gear to get a dead battery going with no problem, one still has to GET AT the battery.

The problem: How to pop the hood when a dead battery left the car hood/trunk lids in “locked” mode?

3 possible solutions (via the Internet):
1. Hack the fuse box with a 9V battery and temporarily power up the solenoid that activates the locking/unlocking mechanism for the hood/trunk.
2. Find and pull the manual release cable…somewhere underneath the front passenger wheel well.
3. Use a small screw driver to manually push away the plate that is locking down the lever.

We have had the Boxster for fourteen years and have worked on quite a few areas of the car and have, of course, ran into this issue before…7 or 8 years ago. At that time, we managed to get the hood released using Internet Solution #3…only it was Summer, our eyes were better, and we weren’t running out of day light.

Also, it would have helped if we had remember what tool we had used, what “the plate” looked like, and how exactly we had managed to “release” the mechanism. Other than that, we were good to go.

The first challenge was trying to SEE what we were supposed to push out of the way…which was confusing as the gap (red arrow) was tiny and much of the light from the flashlight was bouncing back, making it hard to see much of anything.

The second challenge was, in order to manipulate anything, the screw driver had to be thin enough to fit into the gap and be long enough to do something.

The last challenge was figuring out WHAT piece of the mechanism to manipulate. After a lot of futzing, muttering, coming back into the office to look things up on the Internet, and to warm up, we finally “got it” again.

What needs to happen

In order to lift the release lever, the “red” bit in the diagram had to be pushed out of the way. Once out of the way, the tab will be free to move downward as the lever is pulled in the “up” direction.

Realizing that we had better document the solution for the next time, we drew up a highly detailed and sophisticated, but unfortunately not to scale, diagram to remind us of the location of the critical bits and what to do. We are sure it will be crystal clear when we look at it again in 7 years…

The Technique

We used a thin flat head screwdriver and did it by feel.
We also knew that we didn’t need to push from the end of the plate that is “blocking” the lever from being lifted.
Each little push moved the plate a bit and the action was cumulative.
The plate that was “in the way” is not spring-loaded or anything. Just putting the screwdriver on top of the plate, pressing, and kind of pushing inward toward the inside of car worked.