PTEC

First off, NO rivets have to be removed to take the door carrier out. I doubt the door frame is tweaked, the carrier is probably just not adjusted correctly. When you have the door carrier out, close the door and see if the door skin will line up with the body, if it does its not tweaked. Those door units are a real pain in the *** to adjust, I feel for anyone trying to do this in their garage for the first time. I usually use painters tape and mark the height of the front and the back and the forward and backward adjustment. The way those adjusters works you cant really just cross your fingers and hope they didn't move, the action of unscrewing the bolt moves the adjuster. I would not take it to the body shop, they dont know how to adjust these either unless maybe you know of a Porsche specific one but I see so many of these that come from body shops that are maladjusted and dont close properly. If you're tapping out take it to the dealer and ask for a tech that is familiar with gen 1 cayenne, they've done a thousand of these. If you want to keep messing with it I would guess the bowden cable for the outer door handle is probably adjusted too tight. This puts the door lock in a weird limbo state where it wont open. Its been a while since I've seen one of these but I have seen people have some luck with pressing or pulling on the door as hard as they can and playing with the handle and sometimes you can get it to catch and open but not always. Your best bet it try to remove the door panel from the inside (which is a royal pain as well) and sometimes this will take enough tension off the inner door handle cable and then it will open from the outside.

frederickcook87

oldskewel

PTEC's advice fits with my understanding too. On that cable, what I found was that you'd get into the door-closed-forever situation when it was set too TIGHT. More slack, or completely removed would be fine. With no cable there or a very slack cable, true, the outer door handle would not function. But the inner door handle would be fine. The problem is when that cable is too tight and it somehow prevents the door lock actuator mechanism from resetting after the door closes, and then you're stuck like you are.

Petza had that issue and was able to get it to reset by banging on things until (my guess is that ...) the mechanism would reset itself even with the extra tension on there, due to all the jiggling. I expect that since your door was working fine for several tries, you are probably close enough to acceptable tension, that some banging may be all it needs. And anything else you can try to reduce tension on that cable while doing it.

For me it was not that difficult since I did not have the DUC back in place yet - I documented that situation in one of the links at the bottom of my post with the DUC removal instructions.

And hey, if you do tap out on this one, PLEASE find out whatever tricks the pro's use to get out of that situation. Beyond what worked for me (with no DUC in place) and Petza (banging on it), I don't know what would be the next step if those don't work. Maybe drill out the door lock plug to access the cable? Maybe slip something down past the window to contact and pull / disengage the cable (I don't know how possible this even is, and it may be protected from this sort of access for anti-theft reasons)? I do remember staring at the situation I was in (briefly) and thinking there was no good way out of this one - but that was mainly because I had no idea about the cable tension being the cause of the problem.

On the "alignment" with the adjustable washer things, not know what was going on when I disassembled things, I was not as careful as I put in my instructions. And any misalignment I've got is not noticeable, so I think the adjustment is kind of if you're looking for perfection. If you've got a gaping gap, you've got another problem rather than washer adjustment and alignment.

PTEC

frederickcook87