Nistune Forums

So I was trying to figure out a problem with my son's 240sx/rb20det and got a consult cable. I noticed while using it that if you moved the wires any it would disconnect. I checked the wires and found they wire just twisted together kind of sloppy so figured I would solder them up. The soldering is no problem and I got that done. I hooked the ECU back up and turned the switch on on the car and guess what happened. The magic smoke started coming out of the ECU. I quickly turned off the switch and investigated. Turned out the previous owner or someone had wired the Dakota Digital tach interface up with wires that were way to big to fit in the connections on the DD interface. So the power and ground touched in my moving the wires around and I did not notice it. I took the ECU out and went to the workbench and started troubleshooting. I found the trace underneath the board from the gate off of the first mosfet to a pad had melted and come loose. Luckily a peice of jumper wire soldered in later and the ECU is as good as new. Glad it just burnt the trace and nothing else.

The connections on the DD interface have been fixed and isolated from each other and it won't happen again. Just goes to show you not to trust other people's handy work sometimes.

Issues with the car have been sorted out and it is running better than ever now.

Sometimes people should not be allowed to wire their own cars!!

I've repaired quite a few ECUs in the past with burnt out tracks for ignition input (and sometimes diode / resistor) as well as burnt out ECCS relay, tacho, coil and injector driver transistors/ICs. Most are due to poor wiring or bad grounding