Our Honda Odyssey was hit in the driver-side door. Several months after receiving the vehicle back from the body shop, I noticed that the passenger-side window would go down whenever someone closed the driver-side rear window. The passenger window could then be subsequently closed. This never happened before the accident. We operated the windows like this for some time until I finally decided to try to solve the problem.
My initial thought was that some of the wires in the door had shorted together. I pulled the door panel and discovered that there was no damage, and they were all intact. I then pulled out the shop manual, studied the wiring diagrams, and learned that the driver’s window switch assembly was a local controller that sent control signals to window controllers under the dash and at the rear of the vehicle. While operating the windows as part of the troubleshooting process, I also learned that the rear window would close when the passenger window was opened from the driver’s door.
The easiest next step would have been to replace the driver-side switch assembly. This, of course, would not be nearly as much fun as figuring out why the windows did not work correctly. I inspected the window switch control board with a magnifying glass.
The leads from the four window switches are connected to the control board in a row of solder joints at the edge of the board. With the help of the magnifying glass, I found a tiny bridge of solder between two of the solder connections. The two connections were from the front passenger-side window switch and rear driver-side window switch! Now it all made perfect sense. I carefully removed the solder bridge with a knife, and the windows now work as they should.
This entry was submitted by Thomas W. Manning, Jr., PE, and edited by Rob Spiegel.
Tom Manning graduated from Drexel University in 1984 with a master's degree in mechanical engineering and began working in the field of machine vibration measurements in the engineering department of DuPont. In 1989, he began process equipment development work for the DuPont Lycra business at Benger Laboratory. He returned to DuPont Engineering in 2005 and now works to improve the quality, yield, and productivity of Nomex and Kevlar products.
Tell us your experience in solving a knotty engineering problem. Send stories to Rob Spiegel for Sherlock Ohms.
I don't know how hard the author was hit, or how he was hit, but it's interesting to note that minivans (such as the Odyssey) didn't have large sliding doors on the driver's side for many years because they couldn't provide sufficient torsional stiffness when they had big door openings on both sides (remember how minivans only had one sliding door a few years back?). Sounds like all that FEA work on the Odyssey's space frame did its job.
Appliance repair men work in modules. They will generally only replace defective FRUs. We had a problem with one a while ago. It was in a double oven. The repair guy told us that the module was no longer manufactured, so he could not fix it. He suggested replacing the oven. Oh, by the way, the new ones were slightly different in size (same manufacturer, mind you).
Well, I isolated the problem to a component, which would need to be replaced. I decided to have the module repaired when we found that there were places that did that. One of them was near by, so I took it in rather than shipping it. It works fine now. For about $150 I avoided a purchase of over $2,000. It pays to fix, rather than to replace.
Come to think of it, your opening line was, ",,,hit in the driver-side door". I would speculate that the body shop may have opted for a non-factory-authorized replacement module after the factory window module was destroyed.
Like Mr. Goodwrench always used to say, "Insist on Genuine {GM} Parts". Third –party component manufactures have no responsibility for the overall quality of an electrical system, because they have "no skin in the game", so to speak. They are trying only to peddle after-market modules.
I've spent half a lifetime examining mother boards and solder joints under a microscope and have often found things that make me wonder where the QA process is at many world-class companies.Your example of solder bridging is likely root caused as too much solder on the connector joints, and further root caused to poor stencil & pad design at the PCB layout stage.
If you're familiar with high volume manufacturing of electronics, you know that each electrical component, (in this case, switches) comes from it's manufacture with a recommended PCB hole pattern, or a recommended solder-pad layout if an SMD device. Its up to the PCB designer to follow the recommendation, or the "fault" can be pointed to the switch manufacture for bad solder joint design. In the case of Honda, its surprising that solder bridging is occurring on a world class car like an Odyssey.
I'm curious, too, about the origin of the solder bridge. It sounds like something that either was there to start with in the factory--but then shouldn't it have caused this problem a lot sooner?--or that it occurred at the body shop during the door's post-accident repair.
Was the solder bridge a result of the impact or was it a glitch that occurred unrelated to the accident? I have to applaud your detective work. I wish the larger pool of appliance repair men/women and mechanics had similar tenacity to stay on a problem!
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