Hah!
Betcha thought this thread was finished eh?
Nope.
Next installment is hooking up the mirror heat and remapping the printed circuit board for the power mirror switch.
We'll make this post about hooking up the mirror heat.
There are some specific things you'll need to hook up "heat". You could do just a switch or a switch and relay, but that's not the "elegant" way to do it.
I prefer my vehicles to look clean and properly integrated so....
After a bit of a search, I finally turned up one of these in a local yard:
Managed to snag it for 75 bucks. That hurt a bit, but finding one around here is difficult.....if you can find it at all.
I felt a little better about paying that much when the guy threw in some bits I'd been looking for at no extra cost:
My switches have the little symbols worn off. These still look pretty good, and there's enough that both my doors can get fresh set rocker switch covers.
The big "knob" is the headlight switch. This one actually is new looking instead of the "fondled by 4000 heavy smokers" look that most of them have.
There's also a remote mirror switch that I can hack up to remap the switch pads on the circuit board. This will give me the proper up and down functioning instead of the backwards operation the stock GM wiring forced me to accept.
But getting back to heat, you might ask why you even need another heater control?
Well, you need it for this:
Inside, behind that little button, is a timer. It powers the mirror heat (and rear defroster) and then shuts them down after a specified period of time.
It came with Suburbans, Tahoes and Blazers. By the time these hit the yards here, they're mostly stripped clean of these suckers. A very
VERY few pickups had them, but that's even harder to come by....
But it's not rated to handle the current all by itself. If you try to run the mirrors (and rear heat) directly off the control, you'll probably burn it out
tout de suite!
GM includes a relay in their circuit for this very purpose:
I pulled out my old heater controls, and discovered The General had helped me out a bit.
There was a wiring connector snapped onto the old unit right where the defroster controls should be. No switch, no control or contacts, but it was there.
Thinking my luck couldn't be this good, I plugged in the new controller connectors.
No surprise that the heat and AC worked, but so did the rear defrost button! Thise wires weren't just for show, they're powered and ready to go!
I'll just have to trace down the wire bundle to the breakout and carry on out to the heated mirrors.
I'll have to pick up a few 2 wire weather pac connectors for the mirrors and then just a little bit of wiring work to go....
