I'm thinking of trying to jumper the wires that plug into the back of the fan speed control switch itself to see what's what. Not too sure if this is advisable but that's what fuses are for, right?

All of the blend doors and whatnot are operable. The A/C compressor itself clicks on when selected and you can hear the doors open/shut. Hopefully it's not a dash-out operation.

 

You do NOT have to drop the whole dash to get to the console containing the switch. You do spend about 5 minutes removing a few screws on the bezel surrounding it. See how simple it is:



Before you go for it any further and just throw parts at it hoping for the better, get your hands on a DVM (HF sells them for $8, or less on sale) and check for voltage at the appropriate locations to verify that a part is actually bad, then replace it. You can use the ohmmeter function on the meter to test the switch itself (among other things) to see if it is even bad before considering replacement.

For your convenience and to promote ease and rapid progress in testing for voltage at the appropriate locations, identifying the culprit and fixing it, I have attached a link to the wiring diagrams/schematic to the 04 Ranger.

http://computingzone.net/files/04_fo...r_complete.pdf

 

Maybe a dumb ?, but have you checked for power AT the connector to the resistor block?

 

You're a saint CBB9M. That's the diagram I'm looking for. Thankfully, I do have a DVM and have a few new things to check now.

For reference, the dash piece comes out with 2 7mm bolts, 4 more to remove the HVAC panel itself.

Will post my findings in a bit.

 

Found out it was blowing the pink 30A fuse in the battery junction box. Pulled the blower fan itself and it was locked up solid. Guess that explains why it only twitched when I jumpered voltage to it yesterday.

Thanks for all the help! You guys are tops!

 

Good to hear it all worked out. That diagram is handy and I"m glad I downloaded it (forever mine), I've got the Ford factory service CD with schematics but they tend to be scattered over more than one page sometimes making looking more of a hassle. These schematics in the linky, someone merged all the relevant info for a system onto one or very few more and well arranged pages, and they're obviously based off the factory schematics. Just one thing they screwed up on, and that is, they deleted wire gages. However, they do happen to have Ranger schematics over on autozone.com, just gotta open a quick account to gain access to their free service manuals.