This was a problem in my '01, whether the key was in, lights were off or on...the chime kept dinging at me unless the doors were closed. So I inspected further and found this:
First off you need to remove the black trim behind the wheel, it just pops right off. Remove wheel tilt lever by unscrewing it counter clockwise, then the 3 screws under the steering wheel.
The black plastic around the wheel is two pieces. Carefully take the bottom part off first, for the top piece you have to remove the ignition cylinder by turning the key to the on position but don't start the truck, then pressing a small button underneath with a small screwdriver will allow you to pull out the cylinder easily.
Here is where one or two things have gone wrong causing your chime to think the key is in even when it's not. Either the orange plastic piece with the contacts is bad or loose.
Or like in my case, the blue plastic piece on the housing has come loose and not making contact.
In my case it was broken completely. I tried using adhesive, then superglue, then finally a combination of superglue and zipties to keep it on where it's supposed to go because everytime I went to put everything back together it'd fall back out.
Anyway, there you go guys.....I think you could just clip the wire and tape it so it doesn't make contact anymore if you don't want to hear it ever again, but I decided to just fix it instead of doing away with it. I'm not 100% sure it won't affect anything else though, so it's your call.
First off you need to remove the black trim behind the wheel, it just pops right off. Remove wheel tilt lever by unscrewing it counter clockwise, then the 3 screws under the steering wheel.
The black plastic around the wheel is two pieces. Carefully take the bottom part off first, for the top piece you have to remove the ignition cylinder by turning the key to the on position but don't start the truck, then pressing a small button underneath with a small screwdriver will allow you to pull out the cylinder easily.
Here is where one or two things have gone wrong causing your chime to think the key is in even when it's not. Either the orange plastic piece with the contacts is bad or loose.
Or like in my case, the blue plastic piece on the housing has come loose and not making contact.
In my case it was broken completely. I tried using adhesive, then superglue, then finally a combination of superglue and zipties to keep it on where it's supposed to go because everytime I went to put everything back together it'd fall back out.
Anyway, there you go guys.....I think you could just clip the wire and tape it so it doesn't make contact anymore if you don't want to hear it ever again, but I decided to just fix it instead of doing away with it. I'm not 100% sure it won't affect anything else though, so it's your call.
