Fleetwood broken turn signal stalk receiver thing

Fuzzy dice or LED bulbs are not a repair
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Adam
Posts: 2240
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 9:50 pm

Fleetwood broken turn signal stalk receiver thing

Post by Adam »

The stalk wasn't broken, the pot-metal piece which the stalk's receiver is held in place with broke. This means that you can signal right, but in order to signal left you need to jam your finger in the side of the column and move the assembly down. Pretty annoying. The car needs an inspection sticker so I figured I'd fix it.

Conveniently, this part can not be purchased. I had the column from the Caprice, but the turn signal positioning is a little different in the Caprice plus that car didn't have cruise control so not sure that would have worked. Anyway, back in September I bought a used column from eBay. A bit pricey for a small switch with a metal bracket on it, but now I have all the parts. I was going to just swap in the new column, but the steering wheel/airbag was more worn on the "new" column I decided to swap out the parts.
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Step 1: disassemble the new column. I plan to swap out the whole part in the upper right hand corner so I don't have to take it out of the housing.
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Step 2: put the parts in the car.
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Taking the lower dash out gives you more access for fishing the harnesses out.
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Disassemble
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Steering wheel removal tool
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More disassemble
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Make sure you note the alignment on the air bag clock spring. Unless you don't need to. Either way, I did.
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Even more disassemble
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Lock plate lock ring. Requires a tool (pictured).
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The Y-shaped thing attaches the actual turn signal switch (yellow thing) to the stalk receiver.
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In order to take out all the screws, the switch needs to be in "right turn" mode
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Rear cover as seen from the LH side. The tilt mechanism is at the top of the photo.
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Here's the under-dash wiring. Typical GM stuff here.
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Wiring disconnected
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Don't forget to remove the hazard switch. This screws directly into the turn signal switch through a hole in the column.
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After pulling the turn signal switch out of the column, I noticed one of the wires was damaged. For those of you who are not familiar with these Saignaw columns in these GMs, all the switches are in the upper part of the column near the steering wheel, but the harness for each of the switches is integral to the switch so part of the installation process is to feed the harness down through the column to get to the base where all the connectors are. This can be a bit of a pain.
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Turn signal switch removed. The two harnesses coming out the top are the air bag clock spring and the pass key. You can also see the turn signal stalk harness coming from the left. The hole at the bottom is where all the wires go through the column. Don't mind the sun.
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That small white thing for the horn on the right pulls out. Also it blocks taking out the lock cylinder lock pin and one of the housing bolts.
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Upper housing removed.
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25 attachments is the limit, so time for a second post.
Adam
Posts: 2240
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 9:50 pm

Re: Fleetwood broken turn signal stalk receiver thing

Post by Adam »

I inadvertently figured out why pass key didn't work in this car before. The wire was broken in the column so the PCM couldn't read the key resistance value. I'll be fixing that.
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Here's some shots of all the mechanical nonsense inside of this column.
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Here's the broken stuff
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Fixed the pass key wires
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Installation is reverse of removal. I ended up using the turn signal switch that came with the column to work around the wires being cracked. This column was from a '96 Fleetwood. Unbeknownst to me, they changed the harness on the turn signal stalk under the dash. I only noticed this while I was under the dash plugging things back in. Not a huge issue as I swapped the old harness connector back onto the new harness, I just had to use a soldering iron under the dash rather than on the bench.

Everything seems to be working now. Time to get a sticker.
bill25
Posts: 2583
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2013 2:20 pm

Re: Fleetwood broken turn signal stalk receiver thing

Post by bill25 »

Nice job!!! That is a crazy amount of work to fix the directional.
Adam
Posts: 2240
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 9:50 pm

Re: Fleetwood broken turn signal stalk receiver thing

Post by Adam »

bill25 wrote:Nice job!!! That is a crazy amount of work to fix the directional.
It took about 4 hours over two days for disassembling two columns, fixing two harnesses and reassembling a column.
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