To get to the switch I had to remove the knobs and the front panel of the burner valves. There were some dozen screws, top and bottom holding the panel in-place. The switch slid off the burner valve stem easily but removing the wires I had to pull with the pliers. There seamed not to be a wire release that I could see. Replacin
... Read moreg the wires was no problem. They slid into place by just pushing them in. Assembly was the reverse.
1. I accessed the burner ignition switches by lifting off stove top, sliding off burner knobs and oven knob, and removing the front switch cover (secured with 4 screws on top and 2 screws underneath).
2. I diagnosed which switch was broken: all four switches are wired together, so one faulty switch will affect sparking on both
... Read more the left and right sides of the stove. I suspected a particular switch because that burner had occasionally struggled to ignite in recent weeks and felt "loose" when turned on.
After unplugging the stove from the electrical outlet and turning on the range fan, I slid several of the switches off their gas valve stems. When comparing the suspect switch to two other switches, the suspect switch felt "loose" when rotated and didn't have the same places of resistance that the other two had.
Feeling more confident that I had found the broken switch, I used pliers to pull out the four wires connecting the suspect switch to the other switches -- it took a good bit of force, there's no convenient release. Now I could access the switch terminals, so I used a multimeter to confirm that the suspect switch didn't have any change in electrical resistance when turned on/off -- it was broken.
3. I removed the broken switch and wired its neighbors together. I plugged the stove back in and checked that this had solved the problem -- no more continuous sparking, and the other three burners still worked.
While I waited several days for the replacement switch to arrive, I reassembled everything besides the broken burner's knob (to remind me to not use that burner), and continued using the other three burners normally.
4. When the replacement switch arrived, I inserted the original four wires into the new switch's terminal holes in the original configuration (again, it took a little force), reassembled everything, and was good to go.
