First Generation Electronics Maintenance

Mitsubishi, used an electrolytic capacitors in their first generation 3S electronics from the company Rubycon that seems to have had a manufacturing flaw.

The result is that the rubber seal on the bottom of these capacitors has failed, and they have started leaking in a large amount of first generation vehicles. When these capacitors leak, the electrolyte inside the capacitors will spill out onto the circuit board, potentially corroding and damaging other components such as resistors and logic chips.

This applies to every electrical component in the vehicles, including the engine control unit (ECU), transmission control unit (TCU) on automatic vehicles, electronically controlled suspension computer (ECS) on equipped vehicles, digital climate control (DCC) on equipped vehicles, and other small controllers with capacitors such as some instrument cluster items.

Functional first generation circuit boards fall into one of three categories:

1. Factory: The board has never had its capacitors changed, but the are still intact and have not started leaking.
2. Refreshed / Refurbished: The board has had its capacitors replaced before they started leaking. This is the prefered status of the board as you should not have any problems going forward with these.
3. Repaired: The board's capacitors have leaked and damaged the board, there may also be over-current damage which intact capacitors could have prevented. Although these boards may seem functional there is no 100% guarantee that they are, or will remain that way.

This page will soon have information on how to refresh or repair your first-generation electronics.

This section is a stub, it will be expanded in future updates.