I recently bought a left-over 2020 Lariat and I love it. But I hate these gigantic fobs.

Taking off the battery and button covers I can see that these things are a giant waste of space. They have to be close to 50% empty space inside.

I’d like to get one apart so I can design and 3D print a new slim shell with no wasted internal space so it won’t feel like I’m carrying around a potato all day.

Google reveals a Mustang owner did exactly this several years back. He was able to get the 20mm thick fob down to 8mm. But this was a previous gen fob that was easy to disassemble. For the life of me I cannot get mine spit open without risk of destroying it. I’d prefer to not destroy the original shell if possible.

Anyone ever get one split apart?

For the record I already acquired and programmed a 3rd fob so if I accidentally destroy my test fob I still have 2 working fobs.

 

I wish you best of luck with this, and I’ll be first in line to buy a slim fob case if your successful. These fobs are ridiculous in size.

 

I bought one of the newer bigger silver style fobs thinking I would like it better than the smaller older style black ones. Immediately regretted it and went back to the smaller black one. If there was a way to make it even smaller yet I’d be all over it.

 

Do the older black or new silver both work on either gen of trucks? If the black is smaller I will buy one.

 

Since all you need is the RFID chip I wish they had the option of a wallet based card. Credit card sized would be perfect. I have no real need for the fob at all except maybe for opening the bed gate.

Does anyone carry around any keys at all anymore? I go into my house via the garage door which is remote and keypad controlled. I carry no actual keys at all.

Good luck hopefully you are successful.

 

My guess is they would. I used a silver fob from a 2020 on my 2015 and it worked just fine. It was a little hard to program because it didn't fit in the little cubby slot very well since it was bigger, but it still worked. You'd certainly think going backwards would work just the same.

 

That's one thing GM does much better than Ford.

My wife's brother has a 2017 Cruze, and the fob for that has a nice soft touch rubber coating, with a concave face where the buttons are.

Every time I had to move his car when he lived with us, I was always jealous of the fob thinking "how much was his Cruze vs. my F-150?" lol

 

Sorry I'm no help with you initial disassembly questions, but man I'd be all for something slimmer. We just drove to Arizona and back from Illinois, and honestly I just left my key in the center console and locked/unlocked the truck with the keypad or the FordPass app.

 

I’m new to modern Fords so I’m still behind the curve but I know there are 2 different systems on this gen F150 depending on trim/options. Some trucks use 315mhz fobs and others (such as with 5-button fob) are in the ~900mhz range. So there are fobs in two frequencies and they aren’t interchangeable. You need to identify which frequency is used by your truck and figure out which fobs match.

For example, my truck came with 3-button 315mhz fobs so I bought a 315mhz 4 button fob for an Expedition so I could have a remote tailgate release. Worked perfectly. But a 900mhz F150 5 button fob won’t work with my truck.

 

I set out to do this a few years ago and got about as far as modeling up the board and thats about it. I kinda lost motivation because the guy who owns builtright industries posted some images of doing exactly this but he never ended up releasing anything. My biggest issue is the oem buttons follow the curvature of the remote and I hadn't sourced a replacement.

Edit:

https://www.f150forum.com/f118/after...posite-397849/