Decklid Lock

Lie underneath the car and put your arms up through to access it from the underside. If you are lucky you'll be able to pull the bottom of the latch and it will release, if not then you will need to remove the two nuts that hold teh latch on the rear panel. Depending how strong you decklid shocks are you may want someone on the outside to lift the decklid as you try and do this.

A good locksmith should be able to "pick" the lock in under 5 minutes....same as most house locks.

I've been down this road before. What happened to me was that the bracket that the pushbutton was mounted to the car to broke. I tried to reach it from the bottom and had no luck. I was going to pull the pins on the hinges to pull the hatch off but after much fiddling about it popped and I opened the hatch. I would use the search function here. When I posted this last year when I had the same problem, many Pantera Brothers posted pictures and good advice. I my case it had nothing to do with picking the lock. The actual mount for the pushbutton broke. At the time I thought it might be the switch.

A late follow up. I did get the lock open. It wa a real pain in the a$#. I ended up laying under the car and stretching very hard to reach it, and clicking it open. Then I'd fiddle with the lock, trying to make it work, get the decklid stuck shut again, and have to get back down and strain once again. I did this several times. Finally, I got the old and new locks side-by-side, and sure enough, the new lock is physically different. It will never work. I took some comparison shots, and put them together so you can see the problem:

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Ghost,

Call me stupid but I do not see a problem in the photos other than a slight angle difference in the mounting ears. The recieving end of the latch mouted on the decklid itself has some forward/aft adjustmenst (at least mine does) that will allow you to adjust it to fit accordingly and all should be good, give it a try.

The problem isn't the decklid latch, it's that it can't be unlocked. The cylinder you push forward to pop the decklid open...it only goes so far. This new one, the metal part that the spring pushes against, that makes contact with the cylinder, it doesn't stick out far enough, so it can't be pushed in far enough, hence it can never open. If you look at the above photos, you can see how the old one stuck out further, allowing the lock cylinder to have more action.

Ghost,

Have you considered attaching some washers, or some other kind of spacer to bring the latch and the lock to the desired distance to each other?

Michael

Could you fab a spacer to extend the cylinder to reach the shallower pivot or like cyboman said make a spacer for the pivot?
I feel bad for your PITA with this.
This kind of stuff makes me crazy.
Good luck.

I don't know what I'm going to do just yet. For right now, I've got the old one on there. The only reason I bought a new one, my actual latch had broken, so when I ordered a new one of those, I also ordered the locking mechanism itself because I noticed it had a couple of cracks, and looked like it could eventually fail one day. It's still plenty strong for now, but it's an issue I'll have to deal with eventually. This is easy stuff compared to my brake issue, which I'm about to go update that old topic too.