Grapple With The Precious

The brake pedal position sensor gave up the ghost.  Brake lights in always on mode and that disables traction control and cruise.

The part itself is quite cheap.  Less than $20 for the Duralast brand piece from Autozone.

Well, that's where it was.  The wiring harness is sitting between the steering shaft on the right and the arm of the brake pedal on the left.  The stud on the arm moves forward and rotates the sensor by riding inside a tuning fork looking thing.

Just to the right of the stud on the arm, you can see the flange the thing was mounted on.  The screw goes through the flange and into a bronze insert on the sensor.  The placement of the arm and steering shaft mean you can't get much in the way of tools up in there.  The location under the dash means it's quite contorting to get two hands up to the screw.

The copious amounts of loctite mean you have to have leverage and it will take a tool to turn it all 22 complete revolutions to free the screw.  1/8 of a turn at a time.

As you can see, the screw is at least twice as long as it needs to be.

Even more fun, once you have the screw about 1/4 the way out, the thing flops out of its home and you have to figure out a way to hold the tool on the screw, hold the sensor still and somehow still turn the tool!

The tuning fork thing is spring loaded, so it wants to sproing down while you reset the wrench and then uses all your tool clearance taking up the slack.

Joy.

It took me 50 minutes to remove this part.

The best part of this is replacing the failed component is not the complete repair.  Once the new part is installed, it has to be calibrated.  That requires a Tech2 scanner or equivalent.

Something I don't have.  My buddy JT has one.  He's out of town until Friday, minimum.

The car starts, but there's no brake lights and the "service active handling" light is indicated.