I've mended something!

"JCAlan" (jcalan) 09/28/2014 at 12:20 • Filed to: None

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Those are the steering wheel radio controls on my Trans Am. Our best mechanic at work diagnosed them as "bad" by testing the resistance across them. They are no longer available new, and a junkyard sent us another bad set, so that's no help. Some internet searches offered up several choices of places selling the airbag as a whole for several hundred dollars, but my confidence that they would actually deliver the proper bag WITH the right controls AND in the right color was very low. So I decided to take them apart and see what was going on for myself.

The first thing I found was that our mechanic was wrong, the electronics worked just fine. See those four white squares with red in the middle? Those are the actual buttons on the circuit board, and when I pushed them I immediately noticed they made a nice satisfying clicking sound that I'd not heard before. Hooked them back up to the car, and sure enough they controlled the radio just as designed. The problem was actually this:

What used to be perhaps plastic or rubber that connects the finger button to the little red button on the circuit board had turned into goo. Not sure how that happens. So I dug it all out with toothpicks, and immediately started searching for something that would work in its place. After much trial and error, I settled on the tiny nails in the upper left of this pic. Cutting them to the exact right length was the only tricky part. Here they are all laid in place and ready for reassembly:

The wider flat heads on the nails made the perfect surface for pressing the button on the board. So everything now works just fine and I even managed to get it all put back together without breaking anything else!

erikgrad > JCAlan 09/28/2014 at 13:36

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JCAlan > erikgrad 09/28/2014 at 13:41

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Literally

Denver Is Stuck In The 90s > JCAlan 09/28/2014 at 17:26

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Who would'a thought there would be a mechanical solution to a seemingly electronic problem?