Gold box

[John Hofstetter <hofs@domain.elided>]

>Little green men, perhaps?
>
>I have heard that the primary cause of failures that weren't in the
>wiring harness connections was the connections inside gold box or the
>module and not the components themselves.  With repeated temperature
>cycling, you get "solder creep" where the leads move within the solder to
>the point you eventually develop an open circuit someplace.  This is the
>reason you can often let one set for 20 minutes and it will restart--the
>temperature change has reestablished the connection, at least
>temporarily.  If you could resolder all the connections in the box, you'd
>fix most of them.
>
>Howard Pletcher
>Howteron Products Scout Parts

In addition to this information from Howard, someone on the digest a year 
or so ago told us that permanent failure of the gold box was usually 
caused by people leaving their ignition on without the engine running and 
that this overheats a large resistor that is in the gold box, causing it 
to fail. He indicated that he had gotten into his burned out resistor, 
replaced it with a heavier duty resistor and cured his gold box's 
problem. This all sounds so logical to me, that I choose to believe it. 
Besides, would a digester tell us an untruth?  One more besides: Besides 
I would suppose the gold box is in its on,ready,and waiting mode until 
the distributor breaks the circuit causing the signal to the coil. If 
this is true then it would make sense that if there is a voltage limiting 
resistor in the circuit that it could get hot and fail. 

This bottom lines as: if you have a gold box don't leave your key on in 
the run position when not running. 

John H.