So, like many across the country today I spent some time outdoors cleaning up Mother Nature's snowy/icy mess. And after I cleaned up the mess around my place I also took care of the driveways of two retired neighbors.
By the time I was done I was soaked inside out from sweat and outside in from the mist hanging in the air. Then, after a nice hot shower, I tossed my soggy clothes into the washer, and then into the dryer, at which time a thought there was a little too much banging coming the dryer.
Sure enough, I had left my car keys in the pocket of my coat where they had taken a 55 minute ride in the washing machine. Oh well, I figured I'd open the key fobs (one each for my car and the wife's car) and air them out under a hair dryer on the workbench.
I opened the wife's car's fob first. Amazingly it was bone dry inside. That's when I felt pretty good about mine being dry inside as well. But
NO-O-O!, for as it turns out the buttons on my key fob, the four raised bumps in that sheet of rubber, were just hanging on by a thread. The thin rubber between the sides of the buttons and the rest of the rubber piece had torn away and two of the buttons (door lock and door unlock, what else?) were all but ready to pop out of the fob.
The interior of the fob was full of water. After calling the local stealership to find out if a replacement rubber button thingy was available (it isn't, except, you guessed it, with a complete replacement key for $200) I dried things with a paper towel and hair dryer. Then I took on the repairing the buttons.
Here's what the broken out button looked like. The other button was just hanging on so I didn't rip it out:
First I positioned the loose buttons in their respective holes and applied a bit of Super Glue to reattached the buttons to the rest of the rubber. I used a piece of wire to apply a tiny drop of glue so as to keep the Super Glue from running everywhere, thusly:
After speeding up the drying of the Super Glue with a hair dryer I applied a bit of silicon adhesive to the inside of the buttons, using a jeweler's screwdriver as a spatula, to form a fillet around the inside of the button from the back side of the button's front face to the inside wall of the button, thusly:
After 30 minutes under the hair dryer the silicon adhesive was cured
and the rubber thingy was ready to be reinstalled in the fob.
And, what do you know, the fob still works!
Only time will tell how well the repair holds up.
Kind of ticks me off that a $40K car comes with a 5-cent piece of rubber in it's key fob that fails after 43K miles. Just another irksome shortcoming (like the key fob battery clip solder joint failures, and the 10-cent plastic "pink thingy" in the gear shift mechanism that disables the car) in the attention to the details of anotherwise fine car.
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