I haven't gotten to test this yet with my car as it's at the dealer, but pulled the thing apart today (which was a pain in the ***, and I kind of mangled it)
Here are the pics of the internals.
Also, made a video showing how the gear works, buttons get hit, and how to unlock the gear if it's locked in the outer position:
Nissan Steering Lock internals, and Unlocking from Locked Position - YouTube
Also, here are the high-res versions of the pictures. The forum only lets me do up to 600k.
https://picasaweb.google.com/1027199...eat=directlink
Background: the car is at the dealer, the dealer wanted $1000 to fix it, so I went there last night and pulled the part out and brought it home. What's weird is that when I pulled it out, it was already in the unlocked position, and I think the switches were being hit. but maybe not all the way in. Regardless, the temporary plan is to just leave the board/motor assembly out of the steering lock all together. The gear is in the unlocked position, and I'll put the board/motor assembly into something else so I can get the car home.
I will say that when I opened it up, you can see in the pictures that the switches were totally covered in grease.
I use a circuit tester, and tested the switches from the bottom of the board. (See the last picture of the bottom of the board). Going from left to right, and connectors 1-6.
When the switch is all the way out, 1, 3, 4, 6 are all connected.
When the switch is depressed (there's only in, no half-way as theorized by Fritz in other post).
1 and 6 get disconnected and 2,3,4,5 are all connected.
This leads me to believe that ripping the switches off the board completely wouldn't work. Also, I don't think if you were to solder 2,3,4,5 together it would work either, because 1 and 6 would still be connected.