[V8] 90 V8 Bose rear amplifier recall?

[dsaad at icehouse.net]

Having been through this more times than I want to count with various peices of
electronic equipment, and having to deal with it on a almost daily basis here at
work, I can tell you that capacitors fail. If it is an electrolytic then the
electrolite can leak out and the capacitor will fail. Failure usually means a
short. Even if the circuit is fused, there often is a small fire or at least a
burned spot where the cap burns out. Tantalum caps also short out and fail -
often burning up in the process. Almost always, these caps are located in the
power supply area - and therefore deal with large currents, and large circuit
traces that take a while to burn open (essentially acting as a fuse).

In Audis defense, they isolated the failures to a bad lot of capacitors. We do
exactly the same thing. They identifed the range of vehicle serial numbers that
were affected and repaired them.

This is not to say that Bose could have done a better job of designing the amps
to be more fire proof. As I recall, there is some sound batting in the amp that
is probably what catches on fire. If you want to be safe, you could remove this
stuff. Bose also could have spec'ed a more robust cap - but that costs money -
and even then they can still fail.


Dave

snip

> > ... seems to me that missives to the NTHSA might be most helpful.  It
> > doesn't take much to show that the parts used in the 1990 cars were of the
> > same part number as those in the 1991s ...
> >
> > Did anyone with a 1990 car submit a complaint with the NHTSA?  You can get
> > more info n what recalls are active from:
> >
> >     http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/problems/recalls/recall_links.cfm
> >

snip