Mastodawn

Not pinball #repair today, but a car one. Every now and then I have a look at friends' car electronics issues and this one I had learned before. A Ford Focus would generate the weirdest diagnostics errors, but if you gave the cover over the dashboard a good whack and restarted, they went away until the next pothole. I have a #Ford Transit that has this specific dashboard and I had read up about the issue.

The massive connector will eventually shake these pins off the PCB and then cause really weird stuff to happen in its CAN bus. This one is so bad I didn't even need the magnifying glass to spot the problematic pins.

I reflowed them all and would you look at that, no more mysterious error codes!

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Tilda Moose, citizen

@apzpins Cool! I had exactly this stock failure on my old transit van; the dials would fall to zero and the mileometer would go numb, unless you pushed the front of the dash, but this worsened from intermittent to chronic. Fortunately, all it took was the thorough replacement of all the sad solder joints along that DIL connector. Hail, fellow resurrector!

Wish I could have done more for the self-destruct bodywork. We have a national skill shortage in affordable welding.

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Ari [APz] Sovijärvi 20h ago

@MattMoose This is one example where they'd happily sell you the whole instrument cluster for a ripoff price, when the old one can be repaired in minutes. I'm just allergic to this mentality of throwing away stuff that's trivial to fix.

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Tilda Moose, citizen 9h ago

@apzpins
Amen, preach it my friend!
I'd almost always prefer to support a mender than a seller.
I grew up in dad's workshop; almost nothing was ever thrown away. That spirit mattered to him, me too.
We need to encourage and inspire the next generations of makers and menders. There's been enough dumbing-down of the general population already.