Better Door Stays?
 

Is there a way to adjust or change out the mechanism that holds the door open? Weakest door "hold open" spring I've ever encountered. Minor whine for an awesome car. I love my FRS and have light mods on it. but I wish the doors stayed open better.

Finally someone asking about this, not a single time did I open the door and it hasn't come back wanting to close itself like someone has pushed the door deliberately towards my face -.-.

Yeah, that is something that bugs me about this car lmao

The door gave my fiance a big bruise on her leg about half a year ago. She wasn't looking while trying to find something in the glove box and bam!! I also have a mini and damn those doors are heavy too. Of course they need a lot of reinforcement because it is a small car

Probaly the same door stays they use on their 4 door models. Add in a larger and heavier door and things happen.


Don't think there's going to be much you can do about it. Unless someone makes a better unit at least.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed that! I've got a pretty steep driveway & I've learnt to park the car with the nose to the street to avoid having the door close on me when I park on the driveway.

The annoying part for me is that I will have my hands full, so I will try to swing it open and hop out before it comes back and closes. Most of the time it ends in my boot scuffing up the door.

Perhaps you can either file/dremmel the notches in the black door stay bar a bit deeper? Or maybe better to add material to the bar by layering some strong tape to build up the space in-between the bar notches so that it makes it more difficult to swing from one notch to the next? (the black bar is actually plastic)




On a related issue, I found the 1st notch opening point to be too narrow to get out, while the 2nd one was too wide to open in the parking lot at my work. This was maddening since you either had to be a contortionist to get out on the 1st notch, or rest your door on the car next to you using the 2nd notch. Therefore I used a dremmel/file to create a new notch in-between 1 & 2, and now it works perfect and I'm very happy with the results!

I just always wrote it off as the car not wanting me to leave it...


but it is pretty darn annoying

Door check strap.


The only way you can impove it is by increason the thickness of the bar so it has more bite in the groves. You wouldn't want to gring the notches and further themselves as they will cause the door to pop during opening/closing. Take the door panel off, remove the 2 bolts from the body and the 2 from the door side and pull the check strap off into the the door and remove from the opening.

You would then have to reweld/grind or modifly your new bar and reassemble. Wrapping the part in tape would only work for a while as eventually the friction will wear the tape or push it into the pocket of the check strap possibly impeding function.

Reviving an old thread. This problem is driving me nuts. I am assuming Subaru repurposed a check strap from one of their 4 door cars when really they should have engineered a new check strap capable of handling the extra mass and wing of a long 2 door.

I think this weekend I will remove one of mine and see if there is anything I can do to improve it. This would be a great aftermarket part.

Okay I found a small break in the rain to go take my door panel off. After taking off the door panel it is easiest to remove the speaker to get your hand in there to remove the stay check. I put photos with captions on Imgur here:
https://imgur.com/gallery/ik6Y2

In my captions I said I put 3 layers of tape on each side. I actually only did two but I can already tell that three would have been better. The door is much better but still wants to close on steep hills. Luckily in Florida we don’t have many of those.

Oh, while you are in the door panel, add some duct tape to the window switch box so it doesn’t rattle when you have the radio turned up.

Better Door Stays?
 

Damn, thinking about it now. I should have used aluminum tape and rather than tape the plastic part I could have taped the inside wall of the casing. I will probably redo this some day this week.

OMFG SOMEONE FINALLY MADE A POST ABOUT THIS!!!!
I thought for sure my car was just flawed and I was too lazy to take it in to the dealer.
It's really annoying and embarrassing to have to constantly kick your foot out to constantly catch the door from slamming shut.
And for me, it really only seems to happen on the drivers side.

Mine has 84k and does it on both sides but way worse on the drivers side. I’m sure that is due to 10 times the use of the passenger door.

I just did ermax's mod and it works great! I can finally park in my driveway, open the door, AND IT STAYS OPEN!!! Even if the wind is blowing I can bounce up and down in the seat and THE DOOR STAYS OPEN! But instead of using duct tape, I used shims made from an alcohol bottle. This is the best mod I have done to the car yet. And it was free. Took about a half hour of my time but it was well worth it. A thousand thanks.

This should be in the DIY section. I'm sure there are thousands of people who can benefit from this.

Glad it helped. I think I will redo mine today with a milk jug or what ever I can find. The duct tape is working but my driveway is fairly steep and I think it could use just a little more shim.

Better Door Stays?
 

Okay I redid mine with one layer of milk jug and it actually was worse than it was when I had three layers of duct tape. So I took it off again and added a second layer of milk jug. I’m sure this will very depending on the milk jug and depending on how worn your stay check is. My door is supper tight now. Almost too tight. I can open it on my slopped driveway and jump on the car and it stays open. I can also close it to the mid point and jump on it and it still will not close.

I saw someone talking about how hard it is to pull the stay check once it is removed from the door. You can avoid this problem by not fully extending it before removing it. What you do is only open the door to the first detent. It will be open just enough to get an extension with 10mm on the bolt. Once the bolt is removed you can freely open the door to the max without it extending the stay check. With the door fully open you can now access the two 10mm nuts.

So now when you get the stay check in your bare hands it will not be fully contracted or extended. So it is easy to disassemble and modify.

Pictures:
https://imgur.com/gallery/49Hfg

It can also be tricky smashing the rubber bushings back into the housing with your bare hands. A work around for this is to wedge them in just a little and then put the cover plate back on and use the 10mm nuts to compress the bushing back into the housing.

Ugh, that whole mechanism needs a redesign. Going to wear out fast.