5kcstq Relay Repair (longish)

["Douglas Hurst Quebbeman" <dougq@iglou.com>]

Wierd weather this weekend preemted any serious 
wrenching, but I managed to tackle to small projects,
thanks to the help of Stott Hare.

I'd been looking for a door-open chime relay for awhile,
and hadn't found one. Stott came up with one, and sent
it to me. It didn't appear to work, *sigh*. So, I
carefully pulled the cover off, and ripped away the
leads from the chime module circuit board to the tiny
speaker in the end of the relay.

With the speaker looking either unrepairable or 
repairable only with lots of squinting under the
microscope, I took myself down to Radio Shack,
certain they would not have an exact replacement,
which they did not. But they did have a slightly
larger diameter speaker, which I bought to use to
test my theory that the speaker has already been 
dead before I ripped its leads off.

Yes, it worked. Now, how to install it? After prying
the top off the relay housing and removing the speaker,
I found that there was a spacer ring of sorts used to
allow the tiny speaker to fit in the larger hole. Well,
with the spacer ring removed, the Radio Shack speaker
could be forced into place.

To reward me for all my pain and effort, the Audi
Gods gave me a really obnoxious chime sound when my
doors are open with the key inserted into the ignition.

Oh well.

On a happier note, Stott had also sent me an ABS
controller. Put it in, still no ABS. So I finally
decided to pull the ABS combination relay, and 
take it apart. Lo and behold, there's a trace that's
been blown off one of the PC boards in the relay
module. A little solder wick to bridge the gap and
some silver-bearing solder to keep it in place,
and voila! I have working ABS brakes!

During my repir of these two relays, I have decided
that I'd like to get medieval on the fellows at
Bosch who decided to go with aluminum relay contacts.
They are not designed for more than a very few
insertion/removal cycles.

If anyone would like details on either of these repairs,
let me know...

-doug q
--
-Douglas Hurst Quebbeman (dougq@iglou.com)            [Call me "Doug"]
    QuattroClub USA# 4536              Audi International # 100024
       74 100LS Auto, 77 100LS Auto, 84 Coupe GT, 86 5Kcstq   
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."  -Tom Waits