I took a shot of courage this morning, black, no sugar, and pulled my FICM out for inspection. I've been seeing 38-42 volts on cold mornings, but 47-49 at all other times. Truck has been running fine, but that voltage was not right and I needed to know.

Pulled it, opened it up, and found a failed resistor on one of the 4 power supplies.

This is what they should look like after you have peeled the potting away.


On the other side I could see the resistor on the left looked dark, even before I pulled the potting.


When I peeled the potting, the resistor was completely loose from the board and was heat damaged.


The potting pulled the face off the chip where the heat had melted them together.


Repairing this is outside my comfort zone, so who has rebuilt FICM for the best deal? I'm just looking for stock rebuilt, no retro-flash or power upgrades. But I will want to rush it.

I actually reassembled and reinstalled this without the resistor, so that quadrant is dead. The truck fired right up, and it looks like the volts will be exactly what I had before. Which is pretty amazing to me that it will run so well on 3/4 circuits.

 

Man that sucks Bill

I know that you have mentioned seeing problems since the truck was flashed a week ago
Do you think the Flash took it out??

Try This
www.ficmrepair.com

 

Hard to say. Maybe it was already there and the flash made it show up. I know this, if I wasn't watching the volts with the Insight I would never know anything about this. Truck runs perfect.

 

FICM Repair.com - Your Source for FICM Repair I dealt with Ed, his prices are very reasonable and my FICM was fixed and shipped out the same day he got it. Very happy with it, I;m now seeing a constant 48-49 volts

 

I second Ed with FICM repair, did a great job on mine. Wish I had a guage like that Bill, mine I would imagine started dropping like yours, but the truck ran AWESOME, lol....didnt know until it had a very hard time starting one morning, smh

 

My FICM exhibited the same exact symptoms as yours. Just had mine done last week. Repair, upgrade, lightening fast & lifetime warranty for $110 plus shipping. Highly recommend:
eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices

 

We'd of course recommend ficmrepair.com. We hear that they do good work.



Ed
Ed@ficmrepair.com

 

I'd only recommend FICM Repair.com - Your Source for FICM Repair also. A little bird told me they were very good.

 

Ed, I sent you an email about this, so you should have mail from me. But I am not sure you want to work on it because it has smoked the resistor, and I also am concerned that the PC board may be damaged and that you won't be able to repair it.

So I just now bought a refurb on eBay. They will ship it with a core charge, and then I can send this one back.

Ed, I'm still curious about whether you would have wanted to work on it. For a $100 core charge, I might still keep my old one as a spare if you can repair it.

 

Hey Bill -

We could have absolutely repaired that module for you. Burnt resistors aren't a big deal. Even exploded capacitors and MOSFET's aren't out of the question for repair (did two of those just last week, in fact). We aren't worried about those things since we REPLACE the parts instead of ever just re-soldering what's there).

It's all a matter of whether the damage caused by the exploding part took out the board.

The short answer is that if there isn't a hole in the board, we can nearly always repair it.

We CAN do board level repairs as well (where we actually re-work the traces, etc), but shy away from that generally given the need for the module to work under even the most extreme situations). Reliability is King.

Ed
Ed@ficmrepair.com

 

No question on what to do in my mind!

Keep it and have it repaired - Ed does very good work.

 

Have a feeling I would see similar issues if I pulled mine apart, but it doesn't go below 44.5 for me in the morning, so I'll push it a little longer...

Thanks for taking the time to post the pics Mr. Bill... All I want for Christmas is a healthy FICM. I wonder if Ed would put a red bow on it for me if I sent it to him in time for Christmas...