Relay board repair, How I did mine Options

[Bartlett 914]

I have a relay board that was giving me grief. Several times the car would not start. Cleaning the fuse seemed to help but once in a great while the problem returned. The problem was the fuse holder. As these connections get dirty, they heat up. The problem in my case was aggravated by the use of the heater fan. This draws more current and made the problem of the fuse heating worse. I have some before and after pictures. You can see how the fuse holder is leaning back. If you look closer, you can see melted plastic where it is mounted. My solution was to install a new fuse holder. I recently installed an Engman fuse panel so now all my fuses will be the newer style. No more VW fuses! Te resin I used was Vagabond Model-cast 3521S black. This stuff flows like water and dries pretty fast. It is hard when cured and looks real nice. The biggest problem is the resin flowing through the board and leaking. I knew this would happen and I taped where I thought it would leak out. I missed the voltage regulator socket. It looked fine from the rear but it leaked real bad. I had quite a time sealing this up. If you do this, try epoxy first to seal where the pins come through.

[Bartlett 914]

Well Zach got me interested in this board again. It always bothered me that it still had a problem after working on it. The problem was the car sometimes would not start intermittently. I assumed it was the fuse holder as it was messed up pretty bad. Using an ohm meter usually will not find these problems easily as it puts out so little current that poor connections may not show up. I cleaned another relay board and took a picture of the back side. I flipped the picture so I could see the traces as if I was looking through the relay board. I then took a 15 watt light bulb and a power supply and with the lamp in series, used it to ring out the board. All was good. I then cleaned the relay sockets and used Deoxit100 to remove corrosion. I installed the board im my car and it works for now. Here is the picture I used to ring out the board for those wanting to check out a board.