Heh, what do you mean Bill, they LOOK great!!! At least until you realize that every single one of them have a side loose on them

 

Did it to mine just as preventitive maintenance since I was installing LED's and had it out anyway.

An easy way to hold them all in place while you work is to cut a thin strip of tape and tape 'em down before you solder. I used blue painter's tape and it worked like a charm.

 

I did mine last week,works great,great infro, thanks

 

Just finished doing mine! It works great. Excellent post. Thank you.

 

Thanks for the link! I purchased a new set of bulbs a couple of months back and finally took time tonight to do the replacement.

I already had a nice dual setting (20W/40W) soldering iron and had purchased one of those spring loaded suction type desolderers to have for this task. I took my time getting all the bulbs out and then suctioning the contact areas to open up the holes. I also used some braided desoldering ribbon to remove residual solder from around the holes.

Before beginning bulb replacement I checked continuity between a pair of contact holes to make sure than none of them had gotten connected. I also measured the resistence for one bulb before getting started putting them in and calculated what the resistence should be once they were all soldered in (paralled circuit) - 1/((1/Resistence of one bulb)*number of bulbs). My bulb measured 26.6 so I figured overall resistance was on the order of 2 Ohms.

Soldering them back in went easier than I expected using small diameter flux-core solder. After soldering them in I checked resistence across a pair of the not yet cut off bulb leads and got close to the 2 Ohms I calculated it should be. I touched a 9V battery to a pair of leads and BINGO! all 14 bulbs lit up.

Trimmed off all remaining bulb leads, reassembled, installed in car, and put car back together. Working great!

I LOVE THIS FORUM!!!!!!!

 

*HICCUP*

 

7 pages of people with this problem.... thread should be a sticky

 

 

I usually don't try stuff like fixing the digital display on my C-5 climate control, and, I was going to make an appointment with the dealer. Then I saw this thread and thought, Man, if those guys can do this and you only need a couple of tools and I know how to solder, so, it took me about an hour to work slow and not scratch anything or have one screw left over at the end. I soldered those little resistors and it's like new again! Thanks for the info and helping me save 500 bucks. Now I can pay for the inspection and 2 new tires on my road king, but, that's another story. Thanks again for the help, the Drummist.

 

I took out the Temperature Control Unit, Easy, Re-soldering the larger resistors, easy... Replacing 13 bad light bulbs, not so easy - I had alot of hassle trying to clean out the through-holes for soldering in the new bulbs. Might pay to have a solder-sucker on hand. Using Solder wick and fluxed wire to clean them out was a bit of work. Try to ensure you have bulbs with longer solid wires, and not stranded wire soldered onto really short solid leads. Checking it with a battery was a great idea, thanks. Took a bit longer than the other posts, but again it was a hassle to replace all the bulbs. End result was it all worked great, so that's what counts. Thanks so much for the posted instructions, saved me lots of $$$.

 

I have the same problem dim display problem. This is great information. Thanks!

 

wow i did it ...

I dont know how to thank you enough.. Man you saved me some serious money..


This took me a while to do. But im impressed it worked. I had no idea what i was doing. With this post My DISPLAY works perfect


thank you so much

 

Ya know, I himmed and hawwed about doing this myself.I took the CCU out and ran it up to a TV repair place and for $10 he resoldered all of them after I pointed them out(very obvious and easy).I was out the door in 10 minutes.Works perfectly and I had piece of mind that someone that really knew how to solder did it.His solder work was impressive.

Rather happy to say the least.

 

I'm glad I found this post. I was going to wait until spring to find out why the climate display was dim. It took me about 45 minutes from start to finish and the display looks like new. Excellent write-up and pictures are always worth at least 1000 words. Thanks a bunch!!

Butch

 

Thanks for the help Genocid !! Tom

 

This must be a virus. Now mine is starting to go dark. I guess I will have to pull it out and fix it while its down for the clutch repair/replacement.

BC

 

Yep, mine just went out last month Bill. I touched up the surface mount resistors and caps....works like a charm.

 

What capacitors???

Tim

 

Fixed!

Thanks for all the info. Re-soldering the 241 surface mount resistors consumes all of 5 minutes if you use the small Radio Shack 15/30 watt soldering iron set to 15 watts. I also used Radio Shack's solder which had flux core.

What took me the longest time was replacing those 14 little incandescent light bulbs which are placed behind the climate control buttons and dials. About 4 or 5 of those bulbs no longer worked so I replaced them all. Getting those little suckers un-soldered was the time consumers. I tried using the solder sucker, but it really only removes a portion of the solder with the bulb wires intact. There may be a quicker solution, but I found heating one of the wire-to-board solder connections while pulling the bulb away from the board as far as it would go, then heating the other solder connection and pulling that side of the bulb worked best. You are basically rocking the bulb back and forth until the tiny soldered thread-like wire becomes free from the power board.

The solder sucker really works well once the bulbs are completely removed from the board. At this point solder still remains in the power board holes. To clean them out, hold the board vertically, apply your solder gun heat to one side of the board and position your solder sucker on the opposite side. Apply about 2 seconds worth of heat to soften the factory solder then press the button on the solder sucker and in just a split second it removes nearly all the unwanted old solder, leaving a nice, clean hole. This allows you to place the tiny lead wires of your new bulbs into the board for new solder. Once soldered, use diagonal cutters to clip away the unwanted/excessive bulb wire.

It was taking me about 5 minutes to remove the old bulb and clean the hole. Then about 1 minute to insert and resolder the new bulb's 2 lead wires. What really would have helped would have been to place the board vertically in a "soft" vice when removing as well as re-soldering the old bulbs. But I did this at my friend's condo in Hilton Head last week and one was not available.

Thanks again for posting the info!!!

 

As a previous c-4 owner who is now a c-5 owner and new to this forum, your info was great. With your instructions was able to perform successful fix in about two hours (and got out of going shopping with my wife at the same time). Now thats a win win.