Gitter
Well-Known Member
As the title says, I wanted to swap the buttons on the rear of the steering wheel. All but one car I have driven (that had steering wheel controls) has had the volume on the left side of the steering wheel and it has frustrated me that my beloved Ram has it on the right. I have had the truck for over a year, and I still am trying to "get used to it". It probably doesn't help that I still drive my wife's car multiple times a week...and I'm sure you can guess which side the volume buttons are on. 
Anyways, I finally had some time to tackle this little 1st world problem of mine. I watched this video to see how to take apart some of the steering wheel. (Don't worry, you don't need to take it apart as far as they do in the video):
Airbag out
Next, to take off the trim, you need to unscrew the 6 T-20 screws. You can easily see 4 of them in the above picture. The other 2 are on the back-side of the steering wheel...one is next to the volume buttons and the other is next to the tuning buttons. To get to them, you need a small pick (or paper clip) to pull off the small black covers next to those buttons:
Trim removed and all wires exposed:
I circled the wires that connect to the volume & tuner buttons:
Here they are with some of the orange wiring loom pulled back:
What I found interesting was that both connectors had a grey w/ orange striped wire going to the "mx" pin. The only difference is the 2nd wire (it's gray w/ white stripe going to the tuner button and blue w/ gray stripe going to the volume button). As you can see in the last picture above, the blue w/ gray striped wire goes directly into the bigger harness that attaches to the other steering wheel controls. If you look closer at that same harness, it also has a gray w/ white stripe wire going into the larger harness as well.
So my first experiment was to swap the 2 wires. I used a dental pick and de-pinned both wires and then swapped them. Here is the harness before I did anything to it:
Here is the harness with the wires swapped (the bottom 2 wires):
After putting it all back together and testing it out, I was bummed to find that the buttons no-longer worked anymore.
So I revered my wire swap experiment put everything back to normal. Unfortunately, I think I was on the right track, but I will get to that later.
I was going to try and expose the rest of the wires by removing all of the orange wire loom, but it was proving very hard to do without taking more of the trim off of the steering wheel. So instead I decided to just go the direct route. I grabbed 4 spare wires from the garage, some basic crimp connectors, and my cable stripper. I cut both connectors and then wired them directly into the wires on the other side of the steering wheel. Here was my beautiful mess:
I then put it all together and......it STILL didn't work!!!
Looks like I hit a post limit, so let me continue in post #2...
Anyways, I finally had some time to tackle this little 1st world problem of mine. I watched this video to see how to take apart some of the steering wheel. (Don't worry, you don't need to take it apart as far as they do in the video):
Airbag out
Next, to take off the trim, you need to unscrew the 6 T-20 screws. You can easily see 4 of them in the above picture. The other 2 are on the back-side of the steering wheel...one is next to the volume buttons and the other is next to the tuning buttons. To get to them, you need a small pick (or paper clip) to pull off the small black covers next to those buttons:
Trim removed and all wires exposed:
I circled the wires that connect to the volume & tuner buttons:
Here they are with some of the orange wiring loom pulled back:
What I found interesting was that both connectors had a grey w/ orange striped wire going to the "mx" pin. The only difference is the 2nd wire (it's gray w/ white stripe going to the tuner button and blue w/ gray stripe going to the volume button). As you can see in the last picture above, the blue w/ gray striped wire goes directly into the bigger harness that attaches to the other steering wheel controls. If you look closer at that same harness, it also has a gray w/ white stripe wire going into the larger harness as well.
So my first experiment was to swap the 2 wires. I used a dental pick and de-pinned both wires and then swapped them. Here is the harness before I did anything to it:
Here is the harness with the wires swapped (the bottom 2 wires):
After putting it all back together and testing it out, I was bummed to find that the buttons no-longer worked anymore.
So I revered my wire swap experiment put everything back to normal. Unfortunately, I think I was on the right track, but I will get to that later.I was going to try and expose the rest of the wires by removing all of the orange wire loom, but it was proving very hard to do without taking more of the trim off of the steering wheel. So instead I decided to just go the direct route. I grabbed 4 spare wires from the garage, some basic crimp connectors, and my cable stripper. I cut both connectors and then wired them directly into the wires on the other side of the steering wheel. Here was my beautiful mess:
I then put it all together and......it STILL didn't work!!!
Looks like I hit a post limit, so let me continue in post #2...
