[T3] Bad day at the (FI) office

[Jim Adney]

On 19 Mar 2016 at 22:27, Daniel Nohejl wrote:

> I forgot to mention that we used the little piece of circuit board you
> sent us-I should link to a picture for anyone who hasn´t seen it
> though it isn´t possible just now. It´s an ingenious little thing and
> I´m not fully sure how you got it off the board that precisely. We
> tried every connector at the end of the harness. There was no smoking
> gun but we tightened several using some oeprecision tweezers. #24 w?s
> the loosest of them all but it wasnTMt really?loose, just relatively
> ?o. 

#24 is the supply to the injectors, so that's a high current 
connection that really needs to be tight. There was nothing subtle 
about the little piece of circuit board: mostly just a band saw.

> I wonder what you think about Deoxit or Deoxit Gold. I noticed that
> there are "scuff" marks on the copper/gold ends of the brain circuit
> boards where they meet the harness. I imagine the ends could be
> cleaned up with a pencil eraser or similar, but I wonder also about
> cleaning and rehabilitating them with a Deoxit spray. 

The board tabs are gold plated, which means that they will never 
corrode, and the scuff marks don't hurt anything unless they wear 
thru the gold. The connectors look like they are probably tin plated, 
so they could get oxidized eventually, but they tend to be very 
reliable, so I wouldn't worry about them. I'd be more concerned about 
putting something in there that would leave a residue with unexpected 
consequences. The little bits of gum left by a pencil eraser could 
come back to haunt you.

Good connectors are designed to create a gas-tight seal around the 
microscopic points of contact. That's important, and it's also the 
reason why cleaning with steel wool is usually a bad idea, because 
nothing you can see is important, and the last thing you want in the 
part you can't see is a little broken bit of something else.

-- 
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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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