jonathan909

So right. The takeaway is that in 4WD/AWD vehicles in general, a vibration anywhere in the system manifests pretty much everywhere. I had an off-balance (rear) driveshaft in an old Dakota 4x4. I chased that one around right up until my wife held a yard sale out on the highway with it - it took out the rear U-joint, then exited, taking a good chunk of the xfer case along with it.

Would I be belabouring the obvious to ask if you've checked the wheel balance?

It was away for a bit, just came back. I didn't look closely, but it struck me as DNS borkage. Someone forget a renewal?

As explained in another post, that was only one of the reasons that tank had to go, as the denting process busted pump fittings, and that led to an oxygen-deprived-cowboy repair. I just had to make all that no longer be in my car.

And Allpar Mod added: "It's a real shame that something with the McIntosh name is junk. I'm in to vintage audio and McIntosh home audio units from back in the day command big bucks and are considered the Rolls Royce of audio components." In fact, they weren't only built by Clarion, but at the time Clarion owned McIntosh, so there's no telling what kind of inter/intra-company forces led to this. I wouldn't expect anything beyond Clarion quality in the digital portion, manufacture, etc., but I think that there's McIntosh design in the relevant audio sections. I've worked with their trad amplifiers; they are something special. But I tell you, in the last few days since I got this thing going again I've been playing a handful of CDs that I thought I knew very well, and I'm hearing things - very subtle effects, a bit of echo, some cymbals - that I've never heard before on a car, home, or studio (I've radio DJed for many years) system. Let the haters hate, but I'm quite impressed by the sound.

Shucks, weren't nuthin'.

These are all the really flat connectorless cables; they're not wire, but are probably considered flexible circuits - I'd have to check. The big one that mates with the main board below has a paddle attached to it for insertion/removal (you need needlenose pliers for either operation), and it had to come out to remove the CD transport, which is held in place by 6-8 screws. Once the drive's out, flip it over and there are a couple more of the same, but smaller and with those little compression/retention clips on the PCB connectors. I wasn't paying a lot of attention, but it makes sense that one goes to the laser and the other to the head positioning motor. I think one of them may have been a little unseated and the lock skewed by a hair, so reseating it may have been the fix. Makes sense that a connector like this might vibrate out a little after years of operation, though you've gotta figure that Clarion wouldn't (continue to) use them if they proved unsuitable for the application.

(later) It seems I got lucky. I cleaned the lens and reseated the (three, I think) ribbon cables, it came to life on the bench, and now it's working in the car. I'm not about to declare it "fixed" before taking a few long drives on rough roads, but at the moment I'm pretty happy.

I agree, but it's a reasonable starting assumption - because it's the reasonable starting assumption a user is going to make, and it's up to the designer to make a very compelling case if wishing to depart from it. (Trust me on this, I've done a lot of work in human factors, UIs, etc.) Sure, but so far neither of us have found what seems like a good reason for that departure, either.

Oh, yeah, tried a few. Flexing the board a little in search of a cracked trace, bad solder joint, etc., would certainly be a valid approach, but... The board is sandwiched underneath the drive and unreachable when the drive is (ribbon) cabled to the main board below. So there's no easy way to get at it in operation.

I think I have: That it should work the same as does a spare key. A key still works in the door lock when there's a key in the ignition, right? So making the fob not work when there's a key in the ignition is inconsistent from a human factors standpoint. As we've seen from the (typical, I think) example I cited, a user would tend to assume it just works. I can't imagine why such regulation would exist... but then again, the world is full of stupid regulations, isn't it? Maybe my favourite example: An old friend whose specialty was building specifications told me about a guy who worked for CSA (Canadian Standards Association, kinda like our UL) and got fired for writing a report explaining why the current regulations governing stairs made them more dangerous. I agree that the designers probably had a reason for doing it, but can't for the life of me imagine what it might have been. Hence the question.

Honestly, I just think you're grasping for obscure and unlikely use cases. I still think the desirability of being able to do what my daughter tried - to (un)lock with the key in the ignition - outweighs these weird examples you're offering. I just can't see the justification from a normal use, common sense perspective.

I'm not buying it. You can make all the same mistakes with the lock control on the door. Doesn't change the nature of the problem, just the location of the button.

No, it was actually pretty clean in there, and in the car it loaded the CD just fine, then sat for a while before delivering the Err 6. On the bench I spun the head positioner with my finger, and it traveled through its range, so about all that's left is to power it up and see if it appears to work normally. Other than cleaning the lens and reseating the cables, I don't think there's much else to be done.

That's what I'm thinking. I pulled it apart today and there's little that can be done by mere humans - cleaned the lens, reseated the ribbon cables, moved the head to make sure it's traveling freely. I have to dig up a connector on the next visit to the wrecker so I can at least see what it's trying to do on the bench. Unless some magic happens, though, I'll be fishing for a replacement - whole unit or maybe just the CD transport.

Okay, here's a question for you all: "The keyless entry system does not operate when the key is inserted in the ignition switch." I'm quoting from your owner's manual. Can anyone argue in favour of this design decision? We can't come up with a single reason for this being a good idea. Why on earth would they do it this way? This is now A Thing because in the dead of winter, at night, one of my girls left work, and en route home (about a mile from her starting point) she stopped to grab a jug of milk. Since it was very cold and the car had barely started, she didn't want to risk it not starting the second time, and left it running to let it warm up. She took the remote off of the keyring, pocketed it, and used the door switch to lock it up. Only when she returned with the milk did she discover that the remote in her pocket wouldn't work, and she was left standing outside a running car in -35. (There are possible workarounds, of course, but the most obvious one - disconnecting the key-in-lock wire at the ignition switch - has hair on it. Though it would also eliminate the very annoying door-open-key-in-ignition alarm, it would prevent further programming of the keyless entry system, which requires that signal. But in most of my cases that wouldn't matter, because they won't program in situ anyway; that's why I do them on the bench. The next most obvious fix is having both a spare key and your wits about you, which is a difficult operational mode to support.)

And repair even less likely (as if that were possible) now that the Toronto Clarion depot tells me that they can't fix this one because it's OEM, it has to go to a stateside outfit called United Radio.

Oh, no doubt there's tons of that stuff around. No use to me, I don't carry a tracking device (or like the sound of mp3s).

Agreed. I'm not really interested in the potential workarounds. The AM/FM/cassette (curiously enough, I rediscovered some great music I hadn't listened to in many years thanks to just grabbing a box of old tapes for a road trip - ever heard ZZ Top's "La Grange" sung in Russian?) are fine, it's just the fershlugginer CD that won't work. I'll bust open just about anything to take a look, clean it up, see if it's a simple fix, but I don't intend to make it my life's work. And I just heard back from the canuckside Clarion people: Their only service depot is in Toronto, which is a nonstarter (as if I'd be willing to pay the rates people have spoken of for the fix anyway).

Dredging up a very old thread here... I have the McIntosh, and am pretty happy with it - except for the error (Er 6) it spews on inserting a CD. Does anyone have any sort of reference information for these things, even if only the error code definitions? (Scoobywagon hasn't been around for five years.)

Hmm. That's interesting. Just programming up a couple of fobs for the H6 and ran into something I don't think I noticed when I did this a couple of years ago. It appears that to reset the fob-programming state machine you have to first unlock the doors. In practice, of course, this is a non-issue - in order to open the door and get in and go through the programming routine, the door must first be unlocked, and if you lock it after you get in you're violating the procedure as described. But on the bench it got stuck and wouldn't enter programming mode until I started the process with a (door switch) unlock.

Just an additional note here: In the 2001 OBW (mine are H6) the keyless entry module has been moved from under the instrument cluster to the far right of the dash, between the glove box and the door. The location isn't exactly clear from the FSM drawings. You have to remove the glove box to get at it, which should just be a few screws, but also requires mutilating the glove box stops that the manual casually tells you to remove first.

Laugh it up, folks. We woke up to 2" of wet snow this morning.

I have plenty of experience with trouble from ground loops and very small circulating (as in electrical, not liquid) currents, so I get what you're talking about. What's important is that these problems are almost always solved by selectively removing excess grounds, and never by tossing in a bunch of extra new ones without very carefully analyzing the problem, or you can often make it worse. More grounds means more possible paths for those circulating and stray currents, and in this case adding a location (i.e. the rad) for possible electrolysis and/or corrosion that didn't previously exist. In other words, let the rad float (electrically speaking) and it won't give you trouble, even if it is a few millivolts away from the engine. (If there are any vintage microcomputer geeks listening, a formative experience for me in solving this kind of thing was about 40 years ago, working with a client who was building an early GIS system - it had to do with potential oil spills. Their system had outgrown the original (10-slot S-100) North Star Horizon chassis thanks to a whack of Matrox graphic cards. So I migrated them into a big rackmount (22-slot) Cromemco Z2-D box, which also meant duplicating in wire-wrap the serial and parallel I/O that were on the Horizon's motherboard (unusual at the time, as most S-100 backplanes had no active circuitry other than (perhaps) termination). They needed a hard disk, and this being a few years prior to the introduction of the very first (Shugart) 5meg 5" Winchester, we were using a 15meg 8" drive - a Priam or something. That's the part that was giving them trouble - the disk just wouldn't settle down and behave reliably. Disk read amplifiers are quite sensitive to noise, and I traced the cause to a couple too many grounds in the disk system that had been added and/or neglected by the North Star designers. Once I'd had some time to stare at the whole picture, I took a reasonable guess at which grounds had to go, and when I removed them the noise disappeared and the system sprang to life - and gave them years of pretty impressive service.) So I'm still skeptical, but might be convinced if someone can direct me to any solid references on the subject describing this application.

I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but I'm not buying it. Lots of things get "mentioned" that are complete nonsense. The coolant is constantly circulating through the engine, so I think it's succeeding in keeping itself pretty damn grounded wrt the engine, regardless of whether the rad core is insulated from the chassis. I'd need to hear a pretty convincing argument to think otherwise.