All of the ways you have mentioned...best prices normally come from Salvage yards since some of them don't know what they have value wise. But on the flip side of the coin, some yards think all of the truck parts are made of pure gold! I frequent car-part.com, LKQ, & eBay, as well as others when trying to find truck parts

 

I found mine on eBay for around $150, but they can get up into the $400's (like this one). I didn't take the time to look at the salvage yards because, to Firerunner's comments, they treat those types of parts like gold just because they don't have a clue what their actual value is. OEMs overcharge to make between 60% and 80% margins on those types of parts because they aren't easily reproducible by aftermarket groups. What really sucks is the fact that they typically use the same PCBs among all the trims and they just populate the components differently depending on the trim. I can confirm that they are the exact same PCBs in both the manual and auto climate setups after I took them apart for this little adventure.

 

Hello Everyone!

Thank you so much for all the information in this thread. I am a new owner of a 2017 XLT and the Auto Climate is the first real mod I have attempted. After reading through this a couple times, I went ahead and searched eBay for a lariat bezel. I made an offer on one and won it for 150 + shipping ($188). As you can imagine I was pretty excited to get one for this price however, upon receiving it today I noticed the pins were all pushed in on one of the wire adapters.

When looking back at the eBay listing, the person did in fact post a picture of this and I just missed it.

I am very familiar with this happening with pins from all the work I've done in the IT field. I went and tried to straighten them out and one of the pins snapped off.

I went an tried to switch out the upper PCB from the original bezel over to the lariat one however, upon installing everything, the lights were all flashing on the control buttons and things weren't quite right. I compared the two boards and the Lariat one has different identifiers than the XLT one so I did not get lucky with a swap.

Is there anytthing that I can do at this point that you know of to replace this one PCB instead of reordering a whole new bezel?

 

Unfortunately it looks like those pins are part of the connector, so you’d have to swap the connector. The best way to do that is to use a heat gun or other PCB reflow system to heat up the solder from the back (do not heat up the connector directly because it will melt). Once the solder melts, remove the old one and insert the new one. You may need to add new solder depending on the amount that comes off with the old connector.

You could attempt to remove all the solder from the PCB with a solder-removal tool, but those seem to be hit-and-miss with getting all the solder off the the point you can swap the parts.

 

Thankk you for the information Fiasco17.

I went ahead and pulled out the ol' motherboard soldering kit and also my heat gun. Unfortunatley, I was unable to get any of the solder to flow at all. I used several methods including the solder-removal pump, the heat gun, and also copper braid to attempt to remove the solder but no luck.

Is there something on these boards that prevents the heating up of the solder?

 

Very interested in where you're going with this thread now! I've been swapping bezels in Winter and Summer so I could get back my heated seats - man would I love to be able to just keep one in!

Thank you for your hard work on this! If you get this working, I'll def be one of your first customers. Speaking of - if you do get this working, any idea what cost would be?

 

It’s probably high-temp solder and that shouldn’t come as a surprise being it’s an OEM circuit that has a fair amount of current going through it. All solder/material will flow, it’s just at what temperature. It also might help to tin your soldering iron tip and maybe add a little bit to the joints to get better contact.

I’m out of town until Friday, but I’ll try when I get back to see what I have to do to get it to flow myself.

 

I will likely be selling them for $50 (includes shipping) moving forward, but I will be providing them for a little over half that price to everybody that has been interested in this thread up to this point as a thanks for providing ideas and any early feedback.

I was just notified the PCBs shipped and they should be here when I get back home on Friday. I’m hoping to have my own proto made by the end of the weekend, at which that time I will know if they are ready for producing and will start taking the requests/orders so you all can hopefully have these in your mailbox by Christmas.

 

As a note for everybody, my plan is to provide only pigtail wires and each install will be up to the user how they want to splice into the harness. I will provide directions on which colored wires need to go where and the best way of splicing, but I understand each person has different tools and capabilities at their disposal. All wires can be connected at the two connectors going into the back of the bezel. 6 wires can be completely clipped on the one connector (power, control, and sense for both seats) and 4 need to be tee’d from the other (power, ground, and CAN). I will provide enough wire length so the module can be tucked behind the dash prior to pressing the bezel back onto the dash.

 

Hey Fiasco17,

I looked at my solder gun and its a 35W one for electronics. I just ordered a 60W controllable temp one and will see if that works.