Repairing the Mercury Grand Marquis

Well, actually, it's any car built on this frame, like Crown Vics, etc.

Repairing some Grand Marquis's and Crown Victorias

I owned a Grand Marquis for about 20 years. There are a couple of things I found out in that time that require some maintenance, but not the kind that should requireyou to send it off, and it could cost up to $300.

The first thing I'll talk about is the lighting control module.

The Ford Lighting Control Module (LCM), often found in Panther platform vehicles (Crown Vic, Town Car) under the driver-side dashboard, manages exterior/interior lighting and commonly fails due to worn-out internal relays, resulting inheadlight failure. 

Symptoms include intermittent or non-functional headlights, high beams, and turn signals. Repairs can be made by replacing the internal relays or by using a bypass kit, which is often more reliable than sourcing a used unit. Common Affected Vehicles: Ford Crown Victoria, Lincoln Town Car, Mercury Marauder (Panther Platform). Also used on modern Ford models, such as the F-150 (2021-2023) and Escape (2017-2019).

Symptoms: Headlights (low/high beam) not working, intermittent function, or staying on when the car is off.

Location: Under the driver's side dash, between the steering column and the climate controls.

Repair Solution: Replacing the module's internal relays is a common fix, as is installing a bypass kit.

Diagnosis: Use a multimeter to check for voltage output to the lights. Recent Recalls/Issues

Some newer models (2025 Lincoln Nautilus, Mustang Mach-E) have had issues with LED driver modules, resulting in total loss of headlights.

In older models, failures aregenerally due to age-related wear on the relays.

For these issues, I can repair your module for less than about $125

Remove the old relays, solder in the new ones, and you're off.

The second thing is the AC/ Heater Control

After about 2 years of putting up with it, I finally decided to try to figure out what was wrong with my air conditioning inmy 2003 Mercury Grand Marquis. All it would do (Heat or Air) was blow through the defroster.

It had heat through the defroster.

It had AC through the defroster.

It was an equal opportunity piss-off. Wouldn't work well in summer or winter.

We live in Georgia, so both times of the year are bothersome, not too extreme in the Spring or Fall, and we can put up with it in the winter, because it doesn't get too cold. In the summer, though, it's a different story. 90-100 degrees outside, and the pathetic AC blowing through the vents was, well, pretty much worthless.

You got better cooling with the windows down.

Took it to the dealer. What a joke. "Well, buddy, your EATC (Electronic Air Temperature Controller) is probably out, or you need a new vacuum line." $100 to diagnose it (that's a hundred bucks to see if a vacuum line is holding vacuum), which is a ridiculous price. "The part is around $600 new, or you can get one on eBay for $200, costs about $100 to put it in." He said this with a serious face, without cracking a smile, coughing, or looking away, like most con men do.

I said "HAH". Cya. Bye. I'll put up with it for $600-800 dollars to fix it—no friggin way.

Then my good friend Google and I looked upon the internets for salvation, and behold, a wise man told me, "Follow these directionsand get the parts from McMaster-Carr (dot com) and do it yourself. Takes about 45 minutes, costs about $1.00 to fix, and it's no big deal.

Apparently, pretty much any 2002 - 2010 big-body Ford, Lincoln, or Mercury uses this part and has the same problems about 4 years after you buy the car.

So I took off a piece of trim, undid (4) - 7mm screws from the front, unsnapped (2) electrical connectors, and screwed off (2) speed nuts and had the unit out of the car in 3 minutes. No kidding (3) THREE friggin minutes!

Took the unit into my shop, followed the directions exactly, replaced (4) 7 mm o-rings. lubricated them, put it all back together, and guess what. Factory air, just like a new car at the showroom. Total time, 35 minutes. Most of that time was spent reading the directions.

So thank you to the internets for giving me this gift.

The directions came from ( http://www.mercurymarauder.net/forums/showthread.php?t=36922 ) and were posted by some guy with a handle of JACook Senior Member, and he fixed my car.

$700, my aching ass.

Oh, same internets fixed my wife's dual-zoneAC problem on her Grand Prix. $39.95 for a new electronic vent controller, and it will freeze you out—the dealerwanted $650 to fix that.

What a bargain, I used Google(and using my wife's logic), I saved $1310.95 and fixed two auto AC's

Pretty cool, huh? Thankx Internets !!!!

**** Direction to Fix a Ford EATC Controller ****

Replacing the o-rings requires disassembly of the solenoids, but that's really not that hard to do if one hasreasonably good mechanical aptitude. But first, make sure they hold a vacuum when not energized. Connect a hose to the center vacuum port (where the black tube was connected) and suck it. It should hold a vacuum. If it doesn't, the following fix probably isn't for you. The solenoid assembly comes off the EATC module by unscrewing the two T-20 Torx screws on the back side of the module. Pivot the rear of the assembly up, and disengage the tabs at the front of the module. Disconnect the solenoid connector. Lay the solenoid assembly on itsback, and remove the 10 screws holding the solenoids and plenum strap to the plastic frame. At the wiring end of each solenoid, you'll see two metal tabs folded over that hold the solenoid coil and armature to the solenoid frame. Straighten these tabs, then carefully pull out the armature while watching to make sure you don't lose the spring or plunger inside. Note the o-ring on the armature. That's what we're after. Next, slide the coil off the end of the plenum tube, and then pinch the ends of the solenoid frame together to release it from the plenum. Once the solenoid is fully apart, fit the armature back into the end of the plenum tube to check that the O-ring has a good, snug fit. If it does, clean the inside of the tube and reassemble the solenoid. You can replace the o-ring if you like, but if it fits well, there'sno need. Make sure you pay attention to the screw flanges on the solenoid frame. Pinch the end of the frame together to fit it back onto the plenum. The spacer that goes at the plenum end of the solenoid has an undercut inside diameter and four grooves. The undercut end goes toward the plenum, and you'll see four ribs at the base of the plenum tube that mate with the four grooves in the spacer. The armature slides back on next, followed by the plunger, and then the spring. (The flat end of the plunger goes into the hole first, if you missed how it came out.) Use a bit of dielectric grease on the o-ring (I used Nylog), but do not use any oil or anything on the plunger. Make sure the tip of the armature, where the plunger seals against it, is clean and shiny. Don't get any dielectric grease on the armature tip. Clean and dry is what you want here. Slide the armature back into the end of the solenoid, and while pressing everything back together, fold the metal tabs back over. Repeat this for each of the four solenoids. On mine, the leaking one was the floor vent door (red hose). It was obvious when I got to that one. The armature came out much more easily than the others, and when I test-fitted it back into the plenum tube, it was a much looser fit. You might be tempted to replace only the O-ring on the leaking solenoidand leave it at that. Don't. (Guilty as charged, yer honor...) Do them all the first time, or you'll be back in there again.

Thankx for reading my rant!

bigmike

Visit my blog online at http://bigmikerant.blogspot.com/

I encourage you to leave your own comments or reactions to my rants (even if you don't agree with me) in the comments section on each post.

Are you a Google Grokker

Sunday 5:00 a.m. on 05/24/2020

A three-hour tour, a three-hour tour,

That show was the weirdest but best half-hour show on Television at the time. Week after week they could not get off the island they were stuck on, but they could be visited every week by one after another of Hollywood's biggest stars, and NOT ONE PERSON EVER went back to the mainland and said a word about them to anybody to get them rescued.

Like I said, weird.

I spend a lot of energy bitching about advertising I'm sure. It probably bores the crap outta folks to read about it. It may be the reason a few people do not follow or read what I write in the first place but I can't seem to help myself. So much of what I see is just DRIVEL! I mean it's gobstoppingly stupid and annoying and hard to fathom as to why it made it out of review meeting, to begin with. I just cannot understand why more people don't complain and get the crap off the airwaves or out of print. I am an extremist about this, I know.

They have developed more and more ways to present it to you as well. It's on the handles of shopping carts, on the walls of the urinals in the men's rooms. It dangles from the ceilings and is being blown by the air conditioner. You cannot stand in line at Wal-Mart or pump the gas into your tank without being assaulted by a mini TV playing commercials while you are captured in place. I became stalwart friends with the mute button on my remote control years ago because of it and have been known to switch the channel and watch something else entirely if the TV ad was too annoying. Sometimes it gets so bad that I start yelling at the TV, giving them my opinion of their content. I'm sure the dogs, my wife, and daughter have all determined by now that I love yelling at inanimate objects and I am just a weird old starking raving mad lunatic at this point.

This is not by any means recent and has been happening for years (the lunacy and the advertising), however, something else about this I absolutely hate is targeted advertising while you are using your PC. If you are a curious person like me, then you might spend a little time searching for some pretty uncommon things, with the goal of understanding them a tiny bit better. You also might be a "Google Grokker" which is a person who flits from web page to web page using links provided either on a search page such as google or takes what they can find and goes from one page to another using links from one page to get to another without a clear destination in mind. Trust me its a real thing.

Click here to read more -->Google Grokking

I was looking the other day to see what the options were for having a bidet, that thought having been developed by the stories about the lack of toilet paper availability because of stupid people hoarding it when I thought what would you do if you couldn't get your hands on toilet paper? So after discarding the option of grabbing a handful of leaves from the outside like my Buddy Jack told me to do, (because you know I would grab Poison Ivy), I started reading about how to install a bidet, and all the different kinds of options there were to do so. I knew I probably would never get one, I just wanted to learn about it.

I don't know if it started happening on that day or if it sort of came on gradually, however at the end of the list of stories, I started seeing this one series of ads over and over. It was something like "Doctors tell how to empty your Bowels completely, click here" or there was another one that said "Doctors amazed at this toilet paper alternative". There were several more in the list of so-called stories and so on. I never click on the clickbait, by the way, I just saw it there. Stupid as I am, Trust me I do know better than to click on the bait.

Look I get it. Technology contributes to this mess and my own computer is leaking my search terms out or being sold to advertisers or whatever, and somewhere on my machine, there is a cookie or a saved search term (an SEO id), or some such tiny piece of information that allows advertisers or more precisely advertising agencies to "target" ads to my machine based on the terms I've used in my searches. If I used Google's Gmail more (or at all) online or used its app at all, it would be able to also read my emails and determine how to target me based on search terms developed from my email traffic. I do not rely on online email for just this reason among many however. It's bad enough they can do this with my searching, I don't want to contribute with my emails too. I know I could use an Incognito page setting, do more anonymized browsing or disallow targeted ads altogether or I could use a totally different browser that doesn't track me at all like DuckDuckGo, but I am way too lazy to make that big of an effort.

Besides if I did all that, what would I have left to bitch about?
It would take all the fun away from me.

How rich and famous do you have to be, to be above the reach of the law?

1. It is said that today in new stories published today,  that Prince "Pedo" Andrew of the British monarchy faces fresh humiliation over his involvement in the Jefferey Epstein (Didn't kill himself) scandal. Apparently, there is an eyewitness to his groping of an obvious underage girl. She was by all accounts between 12-14 at the time and he was observed groping her topless chest,  while he was staying on the private island of Mr. (Didn't kill himself) Epstein. The royal response has been to say "No he didn't, you're wrong, besides he is a ROYAL", so he couldn't have done it.
   
   Look, If this pervert had intimate contact, made illegal overtures, or had sex with underage children, then they should prosecute his ass, royal member of the British household or not. The Queen should turn his ass over to the authorities and submit him to the rule of law. So what if he is a Royal? If he is a Pedophile then no draconian punishment is too much for him. I know it would never happen, especially in the USA or in England, but I think pedophiles should be executed. I can't see where they serve any useful purpose if they are guilty of that and I'm convinced they have no redeeming qualities that absolve them of that behavior. Being a Royal may have prevented prosecution in the year 1250, but in today's society we and he should know that none is above the law. He also should and did know better I am certain of that.
   
   Throw his ass under the jail. I don't care. Neither should you.
   
   
2. Tesla has made a tiny change and renamed the Model S for this purpose and has resubmitted it to the EPA for retesting to bump up its official range estimates. Tesla has claimed in the past that the model they submitted last year had a 400-mile range and said the agency made a mistake while testing it last year when they came up with a 391-mile range estimate on the official test.
   
   It's all about bragging rights as no one has been able to crack the 400-mile barrier so far. Elon Musk and Tesla said the EPA left a door open with the key in the ignition overnight while testing their car last year, which allowed the car to use a tiny bit more energy than it should have. The EPA has denied doing so but Tesla says they have the data to prove it.
   
   
3. We have apparently extradited a leader of a drug cartel from somewhere in South America to the USA for prosecution. The guys name is Geraldo Gonzales Valencia and he is known by three or four other short nicknames that I forgot to write down and don't care about anyway. he has been indicted on charges of Conspiracy to distribute Narcotics for purposes of importing to sell. I hope he gets found guilty and gets 500 years in prison.
   
   The part of this story I have never understood is why we allow these guys to operate at all. They are declaring war on the USA, they sell some of the most horrific shit to our citizens. It kills hundreds of people every year. We basically know where they are, who they are, who works for them, how many of them there are, and a lot more. We have the capability to see what happens in certain areas as small as baseballs and we have demonstrated we can read license plates from outer space for crying out loud. If there actually is a war on drugs and we know so much about it, and can know more, why don't we treat this as a war?
   
   Why don't we go after the sicarios, the mules, the cartel soldiers, the facilities, and so forth. Who really gives two craps what Mexico would say if we put a cruise missile into a drug factory? Why don't we burn the heroin producing poppy fields in Afghanistan to a scorched plateau? There are known cocaine locations in South America we just tolerate because of a policy that says it should be handled locally. I agree, but when they don't we should. That's all I'm saying. Anywhere drugs come from should be under attack. Even China would get the message and start doing something about it if we gave them an ultimatum about a specific location and then acted when they wouldn't.
   
   Yeah, I know. World War 3, we are pussies, blah blah blah. It pisses me off is all.
   
   
4. The Headline says that Netflix has the fewest technical glitches of any streaming service. I would agree and would go on to say the worst has to be the programming on The Dish's Hopper. It sucks. I have rarely had an issue with Netflix and the service, usually, my issue is with the stale and worn-out content.
   
   
5. Drive-In theatres are making a come back in a huge way according to the Wall Street journal. According to the story I read the restrictions of social distancing and so forth caused by the Covid-19 virus are the cause. I see taco trucks and Movie nights in our future.
   
   Who wants to pay $15 for a bucket of yesterday's popcorn anyway?
   BigMike

The Destination to die for

Wed Nes Day April 22, 2020 at purt near thereabout 05:15 in the morning

My fellow Planetoid dwellers,

In the past few years so called personal assistance devices have cropped up everywhere. In the past few months we have even had a couple of them die a painless and unnoticed death. Of course I am talking about the Alexa type services like Alexa, Hey Google, Siri and others. It's easy to confuse the services with the devices however because they are now everywhere and so common. It's almost like how internet searching a few years ago become an action verb in and of itself because now we don't say "Internet Search for it", we say "Google It", without real regard to what search service we are actually using. So in this context If someone says "Alexa" device they could be talking about a Nest device that actually uses a command for Google to activate it.

It gets a little confusing to say the least. I'm just going to talk about the plethora of devices and content.

My experience with this subject is not very deep nor is it very wide.I'm not what you would call an early adopter of new technology, I've been burned too many times by Microsoft and Apple to not be wary of new things. I always said you would never catch me giving some device access to my house or my safety, and yet here we are, fully enveloped in the Alexa craze. One thing I learned pretty quickly, don't say her damn name. You will be talking to someone about the device, will say her name not thinking that is also the activation word and the damn thing will start talking to you, asking questions, playing music or something because it is trying to do what you asked and trying to make you happy. I tell her to STFU a lot. Probably too much.

So anyway, the deeper dive I take the more I realize its a cash generating machine for it's overlord Master Bezos. It will try to nickel and dime you to death with charges that are right out in front of you but can quickly add up and make them some nice monthly bank if you are not paying close attention. $4 for this, $2 for that, oh this is only .99 cents and pretty soon if you didn't pay attention you could be spending $10-15 a month to get all the joy you can out of the device. You can get Samuel L. Jackson's voice to curse at you for .99 cents I think, although I was never sure if that was per use, monthly or a one time charge.

It will do all kinds of stuff if you want it to. I'm not in favor of most of this, but it is capable of controlling any so called "Amazon Alexa enabled" device, whether that is your light fixtures, front door locks, thermostat for you heater / AC system or whatever else. I saw a commercial where a water faucet had integrated voice control and you could tell it to dispense so many milliliters of water and etc. Quite brilliant actually. Don't know if I want it , but it's something to ponder. I'm sure I have overlooked some of the more exciting ways to use these things however suffice it to say I'm aware it can control TV's , doorbells, cameras, water heaters, smart plugs and so much more.

Here is an interesting article to read about it, Just click the link.
The best alexa enabled devices

The Five fastest 35 mm slides from today

1. I really don't get the current political climate in my state at least, on either side. It's as if rational thought and logic doesn't exist in the political context anymore. We are in the middle of a pandemic, a deadly pandemic of epic proportions that kills indiscriminately without favor, it doesn't seem to care how young or old (although young doesn't seem to be as easily affected), how rich or poor you are if you let it go too long (access to healthcare is something else), what race or status you have or anything else. If its got you in its clutches, you stand a good chance of dying.
   
   In Georgia, the Governator has decided it is about over, although evidence proves otherwise and he is decreeing by political fiat that stuff is opening back up, by God. Georgians need a massage and a beer and a haircut, not necessarily in that order. Oh we are totes not screwed. Open up the Liquor stores, bars, social clubs, the Gyms, restaurants salons, nail places and then stand back. Mix in a bunch of wet sweaty butts mixing body juices in the gyms and wait three weeks. I predict around the week of May the 1st or so, maybe a few days later, BAM, here comes the death rate.Emergency rooms in every hospital in my state will be covered up and the second wave of death will hit us (wait for it),  like the plague. Yeah I know.
   
   Georgia is going for the record.
   We are trying to be the Destination that is to die for!!
   
   Hello Science? Its BigMike calling, yes, I'll hold. "Oh hello, What's that ? You don't care if we believe in you, you will kill us just the same? Well, that sure is good to know".
2. Remember the name Kim Yo Jong. If the ruler of North Korea is actually ill and if he dies, then probably around a million people will die in that country after the fact and a lot of folks will be talking about his powerful sister possibly taking his place. I don't think so because it is a patriarchal society ruled by greedy nasty men, but a lot of people will probably die before anyone there admits it.
   
   That's a war that has been about 70 years in the making. Good Luck staying out of this one. Geez what a mess. China, Japan and South Korea don't want disruption in that country because it will cause a lot of problems for them with the humanitarian aid needed and the refugees it will create however I think it is probably inevitable that it will explode into internal warfare within days of his passing. It is going to be a pay per view mess of epic proportions.
3. Why are we hearing from and listening to Bill Gates? Being rich does not make you an authority figure any more than being poor makes you an authority on how to be homeless. It's probably even less so. He ran a software company, poorly ran it at that. Yes, yes he made a shit ton of money, but he did it by bleeding other companies dry, putting thousands of software writers out of business, by buying up and closing down hundreds of companies. He released  version after version of his companies software products that one could say were not finished and then spent the next several years issuing service packs to correct all the problems.
   
   Maybe the scientists who work for his foundation are worthy of our attention and it's possible he should be putting them in front of the microphone, but for my money? I've already spent too much time figuring out how to use your crappy software, I don't really want to hear anymore from you.
4. GRONK !!
5. I'm hooked on the new TV show "Dave". Look it up. I'm sure unless you are a hip-hop fan you will hate it. Serious comedy though.
   
   *****Personal Note *****
   Stop calling Health care workers heroes. I don't want my wife to be seen as a martyr for the cause, just make the Hospital she works for treat her right and get her some damn protective gear.
   
   
   I am the walrus,
   
   BigMike