Last year (in order to deal with the rear door lock and the badly placed rear door handle) I installed a couple of lock actuators wired to a foot pedal (that I step on when I want out). This allows me to install a pair of
hinged screen doors in the back and not have to fight to open the back door from the inside. This also allowed me to completely cover the rear door with FRP with only one cut out (for the yellow hinge lock).
For wiring, I had relocated the rear speaker to my partition/bulkhead behind the driver, so I repurposed the speaker wires to connect to the foot pedal. I did have to install an inexpensive one second
delay timer relay so that the lock actuator fires before the latch actuator. Below is a (sideways) photo of the back door under construction, as well of the one of the screen doors.
Unfortunately the foot pedal was always in the way. One night, my wife got up to use the toilet and I woke up to the sound of the actuators firing. I called out "Stop that" and my wife replied "Stop what, I'm not doing anything". We went back and forth with this a couple of times, and when I finally got there, I found the foot pedal jammed under the crank on the side of the toilet (where a bit of pressure on the toilet would fire the actuator). The door wouldn't open any more using the pedal.
When we got home I found the actuator that opened the door latch was burnt out. I bought another but I wasn't able to get the system to work reliably. This was because the actuator wasn't really strong enough to open the door latch. With the original I managed to carefully preload the latch so that it worked, but I wasn't able to duplicate that setup with the replacement.
(On a side note, while trying to get the replacement to work, I managed to somehow jam the latch or lock so that I couldn't open the door from the outside either. With the screen door in place, I had a real adventure unbolting Ford's latch to open the doors. I'll rework the screen doors next summer so that they can be easily removed, even from the inside, to eliminate any similar problems. And I'll probably remove the screen doors each winter.)
To get the door opener working again, I ordered a heavier (20 mm stroke)
linear actuator. With free international shipping the item arrived 11 weeks later (3 weeks after their latest delivery date). I also ordered some
push buttons.
With a couple of exceptionally warm days last week, I installed the new actuator. To get it to work, I needed to run a wire through the (door to van) wire run. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Once I ran that wire, I decided that I would run a total of 4 wires, 2 for the (light) lock actuator and 2 for the (heavy) latch actuator. This allowed me to move the electronics (the delay circuit and two relays, one for each latch wire) into the van, where I don't have to worry about waterproofing (and have easier access). I abandoned the speaker wires because they were short and hard to work with.
With the buttons, it's tricky to detach the black middle part so that they can be mounted in a 7/8" hole. Thanks to a helpful online post I was able to figure it out, but then realized that (once mounted in the hole and snapped together) you can't disassemble it without smashing something. Accordingly I made up mounting brackets with u-shaped slots instead of holes.
My prototype door opener (version 2.0) is now working and I can once again open the rear door from the inside.