(ET) More E20 repairs....

[Chris Zach <cz alembic crystel com>]

Well, the deck mower short to ground is one of those problems: It's 
intermittent. Unplugging the deck always works, but then sometimes it 
starts to work again. Main suspect is still that center motor, I'll have 
to pull the whole thing and figure this out.

In the meantime, I was annoyed that my cruise control wasn't always 
working. So I found that when the front panel is open (ie: You can see 
card 4 and all the wires) CC worked fine, but when closed it would not 
work. Fiddled with the wires and found that the card edge connector for 
card 4 was cracking and making intermittent contact.

Broke it apart a bit, then went to the shed and got the repair kit I 
ordered last year. It's ok; the field pins had been broken for years, 
and I fixed that by soldering wires right to the diodes. However I knew 
most of the pins were good.

To get the pins out, I just used a nipper pliers to cut apart the old 
plastic housing one pin at a time. I then sanded the pins, checked them 
with a loupe, and any that were bent or broken got replaced. The rest 
were cleaned up and plugged into the new connector housing.

Got all of them done, plugged in card 4 (very tight fit) and sure enough 
everything works. The current limiter drops out the high speeds up steep 
hills, the contactors all click, and the cruise control works perfectly. 
So that's another one of those long term things that needed to be done.

This weekend I'll fix the mower motor ground fault. Got to be something....

C