Date:         Thu, 16 Mar 2000 19:51:59 -0500
Reply-To:     John Anderson <jander14@WVU.EDU>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         John Anderson <jander14@WVU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: ECU Lifespan?
Comments: To: Darrell Johnson <vanagon_carat@YAHOO.COM>
In-Reply-To:  <20000317001436.27607.qmail@web4007.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

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