Messing around the steering column of my '98 Explorer. Found that the little contact which senses key presence to make the annoying ding-dong sound is loose. It will go back into its hole, but nothing seems to hold it in there, and it readily slips out a bit, touching the cylinder and starting those ding-dongs even if the key is not in. The plastic shroud on this thing has a tang, but I can't see anything that it would engage. Can I just glue this thing in place? Or am I better off leaving it out and becoming ding-dong-deprived for the rest of my life?
By the way, an inoperative cruise control started all this. Went through the entire test procedure. The switches, clock spring, harness, etc, all are fine, but it won't even give me an error code. Clearly a failure of the controller board. In the good old days the controller was separate from the servo. In a way it still is, but they are bolted together, and neither can be purchased separately. So I am going to shell out the $200 for the complete unit, just to replace that circuit board. Any takers for a perfectly functional, clean as a whistle servo unit?
Oh, and here is one more wonder. As soon as I disconnected the harness from the CC servo, my horn stopped working. Took a long time to figure out that contrary to what the EVTM shows, the horn switches don't have a dedicated ground, and they receive it through the CC servo (not the harness -- the servo itself). Seems that when they added the option of controlling the EATC and entertainment system controls on the steering wheel (this is the 'Limited', with the fancy version of the steering wheel), they ran out of clock springs and they hijacked the horn ground for the new functionality. So now no CC == no horn. Cute.