"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
01/20/2015 at 20:00 • Filed to: None
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"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
01/20/2015 at 20:00 • Filed to: None | 7
| 9 |
This is the climate control panel in my Grand Cherokee. See how all the lights, light up? That's good. It wasn't quite like that for a while, but I fixed it. Which is good. But the way I fixed it, well, that's pretty damn stupid.
A short while after I bought this Grand Cherokee, the left-most light in the climate control panel went out. So the left half of the fan control dial was dark and the pointer on the knob was dim. One day it randomly came on, then went back out again. I decided to look up what kind of bulb I needed to buy to fix this, and how to access the bulb.
Well, turns out, technically , there's no way to replace the bulb. Chrysler in their infinite wisdom made a climate control panel that uses regular light bulbs, not LEDs, and has them soldered on to the circuit board of the climate control panel. The factory-recommended procedure for fixing a burned-out $1 light bulb is to replace the whole climate control panel at a cost of $295 .
Which...well that's fucking ridiculous.
I looked on car-part.com for used climate control panels, and they're all like $100+, and who knows how long the bulbs in those will last.
The non-factory-approved bulb replacement procedure is to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! back in, but that seemed like more than I wanted to mess with right now. I then came across some posts like !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! :
I just give a little tap in the middle of the panel...works every time...until it doesn't that is.
I figured I might as well tap on the damn thing to see if it would work. I gave the fan control knob a few solid taps, but it was daytime when I did this so I couldn't quite tell if the backlighting was working again.
That night, I got in the Jeep to drive home from work, and the light was back on .
It's been a couple days since I did the tap-tap-tap on the fan control knob, and the light has continued working just fine. So far, so good!
I still don't know why the fuck Chrysler soldered on the damn light bulbs though. So stupid.
nFamousCJ - Keeper of Stringbean, Gengars and a Deezul
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 20:02 |
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Textured Soy Protein
> nFamousCJ - Keeper of Stringbean, Gengars and a Deezul
01/20/2015 at 20:04 |
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No hammers were used in the tap-tap-tapping.
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nFamousCJ - Keeper of Stringbean, Gengars and a Deezul
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 20:08 |
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MIATAAAA
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 20:10 |
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This sounds similar to the issue I had in my Toyota Matrix.
The clock used to fade in and out. This was caused by cheap soldering material. The solution was to add new solder to all the connections and voila! just like new again.
Mattbob
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 20:32 |
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they did it because it was cheap. That is always the answer.
mazda616
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 20:37 |
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I had a short in one of the map lights on the mirror in my old Grand Am, and I just ignored it when it decided to quit working one day. Well, about six months later, I hit a bump in the road and it randomly came on. Scared the shit out of me.
Vicente Esteve
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 21:35 |
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Such engineering.
Who am I kidding, this is the sort of procedure of problem solving I love.
SALfan
> Textured Soy Protein
01/20/2015 at 23:52 |
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You bought a Chrysler and expected anything electrical to work properly? (Play the maniacal laughter tape.)
Aero
> Textured Soy Protein
01/21/2015 at 03:52 |
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Chevrolet did that to their instrument clusters back in the early 2000s. Bulb out? Buy a $600 instrument cluster.
Luckily soldering new bulbs in was pretty easy when I had issues with mine.