Hey guys. Really weird issue occurred this evening. Drove the truck to town and when we got out the radio and dash lights stayed on. After some investigation, none of the radio Control *****/buttons will work. None of the gages work, not even the lights on the needles, climate control panel is non functional, power door locks are non functional and the front power windows are non functional. Not sure yet what else is wrong. I can control radio functions with the touch screen. What in the world could have gone wrong to cause all of these issues at the same time?

 

Sounds like another one of those connector issues. Lots of weird electrical gremlins can be traced to the cream colored connector on the inside of the passenger side frame rail next to the spare tire. Water gets in and folks have reported all kinds of weirdness!

 

It was raining pretty good on our way to town. I haven’t done any maintenance in that area but it is possible that water got in there. For tonight, would it hurt to unplug the battery? The running lights, cluster lights and radio will not turn off. I don’t wanna drain the battery over night. I won’t have an opportunity to look at the cream colored connector until tomorrow.

 

I don't think it would hurt to remove the negative ground of the battery to save it. After reading about these electrical gremlins previously, I dropped my spare tire, disconnected all electrical connecters that I could find and applied dielectric grease to male and female pins and reconnected. No problems yet, lol.

 

Thanks for the information. I disconnected the negative for 10 seconds and reconnected to just check. All is right now. Maybe it got hung up in a loop or something. Really weird issue. The rear power windows would work but front wouldn’t. Steering controls were dead, turn signals non functional. Just extremely weird. Thanks again for the help. I will likely apply some dielectric to that connector tomorrow.

 

Here’s a thread with lots of posts. There are some good pics of the offending connector and the corrosion inside. After seeing this, I pulled every connector I could find on my 18 and packed them full of dielectric grease the first weekend I had the truck! The cream colored one seems to be the most common issue though.

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...ic-issues.html