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Hello, I’m a new member here and have been lurking for about week since we purchased an Excursion with about 130,000 miles on it for the purpose of hauling my large family and pulling a travel trailer for camping trips. All seemed perfect that first day until we got it home and after dark realized that none of the interior dome lights or running board lights came on when the doors were opened.
After checking the appropriate fuses and relays without finding any faults, I started the online quest! This forum at Ford-trucks.com proved very helpful, and I wanted to say thanks by briefly sharing my particular problem and fix.
It turned out that in my case the issue was a cracked solder joint on one of the relays on the rear of the instrument cluster. Thanks mostly to this forum, I was able to easily pull the radio, dash trim panel, and instrument cluster and find the difficult to see problem and fix it quickly. I can’t tell you how excited I was to put it back together and find the lights worked!
I'm not going in to detail about removing the cluster, because that is covered well elsewhere in this forum. The cluster needs to be carefully removed and the white plastic cover removed from the back of the cluster to expose the circuit board.
Pull the radio, dash trim panel, and remove the instrument cluster.
The relay on the right, just over the bar code on the rear of the cluster, the “interior lamp relay”, was the culprit.
Here is the back side of the circuit board, now carefully removed from the cluster, showing a crack around the solder joint.
A little heat and a dab of fresh solder to fix the bad connection on the back of the relay. Reassembled and all interior lights and running board lights now work perfectly.
It was such a relief to find that this fixed all my issues! I know there can be similar symptoms caused by other electrical problems, but this was the problem and appropriate fix for me. I hope if others have the same problem that this short write up will be helpful.
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