94 Mustang Power Seat project

[jun10r]

Ok, the Mustang is pretty new to me and a few little issues to work out. One of the first is that the power seat switch was doing odd things, so when I pressed "up" the seat went up. Press down (nothing) Press "forward" the seat would go down, press "back" and I could hear a motor running just a bit but no activity front or rear.

I am seeing "used" switches for $25-75+++ and new ones even more expensive. My switch was just sitting under the seat, already not connected to the front, just laying loose, so looking at the bottom of it, there are six wires coming in.

My first 'bright idea' was to try and "jump" from one pole to what I thought was the ground in the middle. ZZZZZttt, pretty spark and blown fuse.... So that was a bad idea. Knowing that electrical switches are DIRT cheap, I will just buy one. Not quite as easy as I thought, still not sure if I am just not using the right "keywords" in my search, but my uncle said to go look for mirror switches and wahlah, Dorman 901-332 on Amazon is $13.79 (Prime) Done...

It has arrived, today the wife finally decides she wants to DRIVE the MUSTANG, yeah!! It was a joint deal, giving her a fun ride too, I have a Wrangler I drive a lot in summer. Seat not moving forward back was not an issue for me it was in a good place, her, she was on her "tippy toes" to push the gas, so I GOT to fix this.

I look at the switch again tonight. Decide to tear it apart and figure it all out. Two blown fuses later I have a pretty good idea how it works. Then I break off one of the poles going into the $$$$ mustang switch, well crap. I suspect if I had cleaned it all up it might have worked, but maybe someday later.



So, plan B... cut all six wires off the switch and strip them!!! (Pics coming soon... looks like we have to use external sources for that, sigh..)

Solid Black wire - Ground
Black Wire with white stripe - POWER!! (These might be in reverse but when tested, those two give me 12.x volts!!)

Forward/Back
Red Wire with WHITE stripe
Yellow Wire with BLUE stripe

Up/Down
Red Wire with BLUE stripe
Yellow Wire with WHITE stripe

(Forgive me, I could have these backwards, but those ARE the correct pairings. You can confirm in my pictures of my jumper wires and then the switch itself, they are opposite!!)

Ok, so this is how you can test and confirm your seat motors will move up/down, forward/back!

Using a BLACK jumper cable, I connected the Yellow/white to the Black/White
Using a RED (SECOND) jumper cable, I connected the Red/Blue to the Black/Black.

As soon as you do this, the seat will begin to UP or DOWN. (Or if I have this backward, FORWARD or BACKWARDS)




By moving the jumper cable ends that are hooked up to the BLACK wires to the opposite wire, it will then move the OTHER direction!!! (Pictures will help)

So using this method, I was able to first, determine that YES, my seat moves quite nicely in all four directions!!! (Forward/Back is pretty weak, will clean up the motor in a future post!) So we played around with all this and set the seat currently for the wife. She is quite happy, drove it around the block to confirm, but my first official success working on the Mustang!!!


For the other direction

 

[jun10r]

Ok, I wanted to post these up for now. (Durn Imageshack is saying they want cash, only 29 days left or some crap. I would love suggestions on good hosting place, maybe IMGUR?)

Here is the Dorman switch I bought, 901-332

There are EIGHT pins in this switch, so two of them will be for the ability to switch from one side to the other. The other six should basically be for my six wires!!

Any tips or suggestions on how to "test" these pins? I have a tester, but not really very good at using it, but I was thinking in theory it should be able to tell me if I hook up two pins and then play with the switches (up/down/left/right) one of those the tester would "see" a connection and I would know which they are?

I suspect they will be opposite each other like the Mustang switch. So then the question is which two pins are the power/ground and the final switch (left side of car, right side of car)

I may have to start this by soldering in a wire to each of the eight pins and just start guessing to see what happens. I emailed Dorman Product tech support folks to see if they had a "map" or pin out of the switch.

 

[jun10r]

Hoping someone will read this and have some suggestions!! I would like to buy a good selection of various colored wires for this and future projects.

First.. I "think" this was 14ish gauge wire based on the crimping/stripping tool I used. Next, suggestions on where to buy it? Harbor Freight, Lowes..? Amazon, ebay, etc?

Next, I am needing a precision soldering tool here, suggestions?

 

[CC'S95GT]

I can't help on the wiring other than to say switch to a manual seat track. The seat motors are not known for their longevity either.
As far a photo hosting, I use photobucket. You get 2g when you sign up online and another 2g when you get the mobile app.

 

[jun10r]

So the first switch was a royal pain to figure out and I moved on to Plan B.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GYV04PA?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00
Car 6 Pins On-Off-On Rocker Switch Momentary Rocker Switch 3pcs

by Amico

$11.26 for three switches is pretty durn cheap and a bit simpler "in theory" right?

So for a 2 way momentary switch.. for some reason it has SIX pins!? Sigh...

Ok so with the Ohmeter we determine that when the button is pressed in one direction, the top pin is then connected to the middle pin on that same side. (Middle pins are not circled in this picture)

To operate our seats it takes FOUR wires all told and the switch essentially switches polarity for you.

To accomplish the same task here I had to switch sides when wiring in this switch.

So, my Yellow/White wire on the car, I created a connection to the YELLOW boxed (circled) pins in that picture. You will note they are on opposite sides. So that basically reverses polarity.

The Red/Blue wire goes to the Green boxes.

The black/white wire goes to one of the middle pins and the solid black wire goes to the other.

With that wiring configuration, wahlah, you are putting the seat up/down!

Yellow/Blue and Red/White are the combo to move the seat forward/back in my case.
(Because there is only one set of black and black/white wires, you end up running a wire to both switches, the up/down and the forward/back)


Since I needed both functions, I created a whole MESS of wires, used individual connectors (Blue, 14 ga wire) to plug into the switch and on the car side I used those cone shaped connectors where you can twist together several wires into a single big honking connection.

So at the car side you have basically two wires coming in from the switches and the single wire from the car, all three combined and twisted together. (Orange cone/connector) I used electrical tape to hold them all together just below the connector so they would not want to easily pull apart later one.

Final thought, this was a lot more work than expected and I was not terribly happy with the honkin huge set of wires when I was done. But, in theory I saved $75+ for the OEM switch that may have been a used part anyway!? I went back and used lots of electrical tape to hold it all together and even tape the two switches together as below so one is pointing up/down and the other is front/back!!

They are laying in there loose at the moment, I may eventually fab up some kind of better mount for them all. Or...I may get ticked off at the 'tired' motors on the seat itself and replace it all with manual tracks!

Sam