Jay P

Hi all, thought I’d add a post for those who are suffering with whacky radiator fan & A/C behavior.

Here’s the symptoms I had:

A/C clutch would engage at every start (A/C switch in the off position ! ) for ~ 5 to 10 minutes.
If it was hot and the car restarted after an hour or less, the A/C would not work, no clutch engagement.
The car came to me with a worn out A/C condenser fan.
The rad fans would run at high speed at every start for a few minutes. At times the fans would turn on and off and vary their speed.

So A/C on cool mornings, and no A/C on hot afternoons getting into a parked car… grrrr

The cure, you guessed it, resolder some of the joints on the fan controller board.
I had eyeballed the board previously and it seemed ok, during inspection #2 I got out the magnifier and found about 10 bad solder joints. What I saw were circular cracks in the solder joints on the back of the board. The solder joints are about 1/16” in diameter, the cracks ran around the wire of the attached component and formed circles about 1/3 of the diameter of the solder joint. This left the wire attached to a little cone of solder that had separated form the main part of each affected joint. Presumably these cracks were caused by thermal cycling, perhaps the amount of solder applied was inadequate. In any event I resoldered using a small soldering iron (not a soldering gun) and some fine electronic solder. It seems to work just fine now.

Cheers, Jay