Hi everyone,
I bought my FiST back in September and the illuminated door sills were not working properly (passenger side completely dead and driver side only one half). It has been bothering me for a while, so I started do some research and it turned out a lot of people were having the same problem, but most of them got it replaced under warranty.
I expected to find at least one person that fixed those and a few did, by fixing the cable, which is of poor quality. However the cable was not the problem for most people, including me. There is exactly one video on youtube on how to fix it, but the guy was not actually able to properly fix it. Also his unit is different from mine; the backside is more exposed.
In the comments one guy claims to have fixed his by carefully prying out the aluminum strip, using a non sharp flat blade and bending the plastic in order not to bend the aluminum, as this does so very easily. So I tried that and that worked fine so far, the red plastic inserts are divided into three parts and may or may not stick to aluminum at first, but nothing to worry about.
So with the aluminum and the red plastic insert layer removed you will see, and from this point on my unit differs from the one the guy from the comments seems to have opened up, another white-ish layer, which you also need to remove, but be careful with this one as it consists of two more layers, but first focus on completely seperating it from the black plastic shell.
Once you have the last double layer out, you will want to slice it open on the edges and be careful not to stick the blade in any further than neccessary, because there are a couple of very small LEDs in between, which will fall of and can not really be reattached, you can see them in some of the pictures, they spread the light, so that it reflects off of the mostly clear plastic blades that are also held in between the two layers.
Now that everything is opened up it was time for me to find the error, which was the contact on the backside of the bottom layer strip, the door sills seem to suffer from poor water proofing, however fixing this was not going to help me anymore, because I was not expecting the small LEDs to be so delicate and a few of them broke off.
My solution will now be to install a COB LED Stripe (12V), which you can pick up fairly cheap, I will then try to seal the whole thing back up again and hope it looks well.
In conclusion: do not attempt if you do not have enough time, or if you can live with the dead lights.
I will try and keep you guys updated,
hopefully this helps someone with the same problem, also I am open to any suggestions
Caspar
I bought my FiST back in September and the illuminated door sills were not working properly (passenger side completely dead and driver side only one half). It has been bothering me for a while, so I started do some research and it turned out a lot of people were having the same problem, but most of them got it replaced under warranty.
I expected to find at least one person that fixed those and a few did, by fixing the cable, which is of poor quality. However the cable was not the problem for most people, including me. There is exactly one video on youtube on how to fix it, but the guy was not actually able to properly fix it. Also his unit is different from mine; the backside is more exposed.
In the comments one guy claims to have fixed his by carefully prying out the aluminum strip, using a non sharp flat blade and bending the plastic in order not to bend the aluminum, as this does so very easily. So I tried that and that worked fine so far, the red plastic inserts are divided into three parts and may or may not stick to aluminum at first, but nothing to worry about.
So with the aluminum and the red plastic insert layer removed you will see, and from this point on my unit differs from the one the guy from the comments seems to have opened up, another white-ish layer, which you also need to remove, but be careful with this one as it consists of two more layers, but first focus on completely seperating it from the black plastic shell.
Once you have the last double layer out, you will want to slice it open on the edges and be careful not to stick the blade in any further than neccessary, because there are a couple of very small LEDs in between, which will fall of and can not really be reattached, you can see them in some of the pictures, they spread the light, so that it reflects off of the mostly clear plastic blades that are also held in between the two layers.
Now that everything is opened up it was time for me to find the error, which was the contact on the backside of the bottom layer strip, the door sills seem to suffer from poor water proofing, however fixing this was not going to help me anymore, because I was not expecting the small LEDs to be so delicate and a few of them broke off.
My solution will now be to install a COB LED Stripe (12V), which you can pick up fairly cheap, I will then try to seal the whole thing back up again and hope it looks well.
In conclusion: do not attempt if you do not have enough time, or if you can live with the dead lights.
I will try and keep you guys updated,
hopefully this helps someone with the same problem, also I am open to any suggestions
Caspar
