Do I need a new multi-switch?

[sho 'nuff]

Every once in a while I'll be driving down the road at night, and all the sudden, my lights go off. The first couple times it happened I thought something was wrong with my headlamps, so I got underneath the hood wiggles the wires around to make sure they were connected and then got back into the car, turned off the headlights and turned em back on and they worked. Well, it has continued to happen, and the fix now seems to be, wiggle the mutli-switch until the lights come back on. The weird thing is if I wiggle it again after a couple of minutes the lights don't go back out or anything. And there seems to be no pattern of when the lights go out. So I would guess it is the mutli-switch that is going....how hard is this to replace? Do I have to disassemble the the steering column?

 

[underdog1924]

I had the same problem that you have. But now I have no low beams. Fortunatly it's pretty easy to fix. You do have to take the covers off the steering column, but that's not hard. You'll need a Torx T30 bit to get the cover under the steering wheel off. After that you just gotta take the pastic off, unscrew two screws and unplug a couple plugs. It'll take more time getting to it than it will to put the new one. Also you may want to replace the headlight switch while you're at it. You can find the switch at a Ford dealer, fordpartsonline.com and fordpartsnetwork.com. Check out my thread about this called "Headlight relay." Good luck

 

[SHOZ123]

The multi-disfunction switch is fairly easy to change. The removal of the igniton cylinder is the hardest part. Put the key in the run position and there is a hole under the cylinder that you need to push a small allen wrench up into to while pulling on the cylinder to release it. Then it's three screws to take the column trim off. Two screws for the switch. The switches are $25 to $40 depending where you get them.