Hello again everyone! I just wanted to post this and let everyone know of what I discovered on my envoy when I was doing my LED upgrade for the entire truck. The other day I finished my door switches and had to repair a burned wire for my HVAC system and decided that why the hell not do the 4 wheel drive switch and the rear wiper switch while the panel is off. During the upgrade process, I stumbled upon what I thought was interesting. The switch for the rear wiper had a good amount of diaelectric grease inside it but the 4 wheel drive switch was damn near bone dry. Upon further inspection, I had cleaned off the surface area that the switch comes into contact with when turning it into position and it was starting to wear. It was not to a level where it would screw up the transfer case by not communicating properly but it still needed to be put together right before it turned into an issue in the future. Well I went in the basement and grabbed a dab of diaelectric grease my dad has laying around and put it on the circuit board and a dab on the tab attached to the inside of the knob. I reassembled everything and all is working great. I don't know if anyone else happened to find this or if it is just my truck but if that is the case for others, maybe that is why their switches fail and not from not being turned every so often. I had no corrosion on it, just the worn part where you could see where the knob comes into contact with the circuit board. So for the other guys out there, I would recommend taking the switch apart (super easy process with 2 small flat head screw drivers) and grease up the circuit board and contact point on the knob with diaelectric grease.
Another point is that somebody may be able to repair their board should the contact on the circuit board wear down. You could try and clean off the board of all grease and solder on top of that layer. Now I would not say that this would work great or possibly at all as the switch needs to move across all of the 5 pads and if you are bad at soldering and make the surface too high, you would scrape the solder every time you switch the knob to another position and would eventually chip the solder or even worse the pad off the board. But certainly worth another tip if you want to try and repair it without buying a new/used knob.
And finally, sorry I did not think to take a picture or make note of the polarity of the LED's when I did the upgrade so someone else wouldn't have to get out their DMM or as I did, oscope to find what the polarity is. It really isn't hard to do that though, just take it apart, make note the way the harness plugs in, plug it in the proper way, turn on the running lights and test the 2 pins for each bulb. I was marking the negative pad by writing a little - next to the pin that was negative. It comes off the board easily with flux remover if you are concerned about it.
Here is the outcome (and no, I am not doing the hvac controls since they will soon be stuffed in my glovebox when I mess with my dash. They are blue 5mm LED's from oznium and they look like a royal blue in person. I had a hard time with the camera on my phone and even my DSLR to get the lights to show up right. lol.
Another point is that somebody may be able to repair their board should the contact on the circuit board wear down. You could try and clean off the board of all grease and solder on top of that layer. Now I would not say that this would work great or possibly at all as the switch needs to move across all of the 5 pads and if you are bad at soldering and make the surface too high, you would scrape the solder every time you switch the knob to another position and would eventually chip the solder or even worse the pad off the board. But certainly worth another tip if you want to try and repair it without buying a new/used knob.
And finally, sorry I did not think to take a picture or make note of the polarity of the LED's when I did the upgrade so someone else wouldn't have to get out their DMM or as I did, oscope to find what the polarity is. It really isn't hard to do that though, just take it apart, make note the way the harness plugs in, plug it in the proper way, turn on the running lights and test the 2 pins for each bulb. I was marking the negative pad by writing a little - next to the pin that was negative. It comes off the board easily with flux remover if you are concerned about it.
Here is the outcome (and no, I am not doing the hvac controls since they will soon be stuffed in my glovebox when I mess with my dash. They are blue 5mm LED's from oznium and they look like a royal blue in person. I had a hard time with the camera on my phone and even my DSLR to get the lights to show up right. lol.
