At 04:14 PM 3/16/00 -0800, you wrote: >With Ken's tale of Digifant ECU failure, and many >others ECU failures I've heard about, it makes me >wonder why these things fail. Is there input voltage >fluctuations in older vans that would stress the >compenents? Is it from physical shock? Is the ECU a >part that should be changed after, say, 10 years? It >sounds like a spare would be good to have on hand for >longer trips. Solder migrates in the 2 I've taken apart and repaired. Not an uncommon problem in electrical equipment, particularly things that have high current paths without quite enough area to dissipate the heat. Plus a lot of the Digifant ones seem to come with marginal quality soldering to begin with, and a lot of nearly cold joints that with time get worse. If you got a dead one and feel lucky (and don't have anything to lose,) take it apart, and retouch all the joints carefully with a nice quality electronics style soldering iron. Pay particular attention around the big drivers along the back on the heatsink, and on the early models on the stuff up on the daughterboard. They fail because of poor design or poor quality control regardless. John |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.