Here is the back story. For the past say year and a half I've had this intermittent seemingly bad chip burn from time to time. I could burn one, install it, it would start and run perfect for as little as a minute or so to as long as several miles and then start acting up, shifting weird, running very rich and very rough and finally to the point of dieing. Normally the problem would show itself before leaving the driveway so I would reburn using the same chip and all would be well. This only happened occasionally.

This morning going to work I took the long way and was about five miles from the house and 4 miles from work and it felt the need to act up. Until this point it was running great. Again, weird shifting, VERY rich and running on about 4 cylinders. I was able to limp it to a church parking lot and I shut it off and restarted. Sounded ok so I pulled out onto the street and went a little ways and it did it again. Pulled over, shut it off and flipped the lever on the ZIF socket to release the chip, wiggled the chip around in the ZIF, relocked the chip and fired it up. Again ran smooth, sounded good. Pulled out and made it another 1/4 mile then it acted up again. Pulled off once again, unlocked the ZIF socket, wiggled the hell out of the chip trying to clean off any grime that may be on the contacts and relocked it. Fired up and sounded better then ever. Hit the street and drove on into work like nothing had ever happened. Ran great coming home as well.

To me this doesn't sound like a chip issue, at least not an issue of the chip loosing its burn, but possibly still a chip contact issue. Seeing as how it does it on all of my chips and not just one in particular I'm leaning more towards the ZIF socket. The contacts physically look fine, they are clean and not bent or anything. I had the G1 adapter and ZIF out a while back before it was doing this big time chip after chip no matter what I tried. I checked for cracked solder joints but didn't find anything. At that time I tried a spare PCM to no avail. Eventually it did start working again and had been ok until now. I'm thinking something is going on in my ZIF whether the contacts just aren't making good contact or what, I'm not sure. Sound right though? If thats the case I'm thinking about going ahead and getting the chip extender from Moates as it has a signal booster in it and I can mount the chip remotely so I can finally put my glovebox back in.

 

I would say that your issues are typical for using a ZIF socket. They are just not meant for high vibration environments. At one time I was doing a lot of chip changing in a particular vehicle. Final testing of code updates, tune changes and so on.

So I inserted an Aries gold plated leaf ZIF socket (about the best there is). And it would do just as you describe. Good for quite a while, then all to heck. After about a week I pulled it out and went back to inserting the chip directly into the machine pin socket.

Although, what I did do was to purchase some inexpensive leaf type sockets. And inserted the PROM into these. Then plugged them into the machine pin socket. This protects the PROM leads from excess wear from the machine pin socket.

RBob.

 

I think I'm going to finally man up and buy an Ostrich. I figure I can sell the eggs and recoup some of my money and get some use out of it too.

 

I used an unsoldered ZIF for a while. It acted up as you said. Finally I gave up and inserted chip manually into socket. Not sure if Zif-Prom was issue or Zif-ECU socket? Since legs on ZIF were fat beefy I presume it was Jif-Prom. Yes it occurred on a bumpy city street.

 

Never had that problem with my car with moates GP1 setup (ZIF). I went to tune another guys car with a moates adapter with a slightly different ZIF socket and my chips wont work in his adapter. His current chip works fine. Mine wont work in this socket.

So it could be problem with chips and zif socket just not working well together. I am stumped on this and cant figure it out. I was having problems reading his current chip as well but never had a problem with my chips on my car. Weird issues like this makes me want to convert to something more modern.

Now every now and then I will burn a chip, put it in the car and it wont run right at idle. Key on, the engine light turns on and the fans fire up. So I reburn and try again, and it works perfect. Just weird.

 

I get that pretty often. Thats why I think I will just get the Ostrich and be done with it. Makes it more like a modern PCM in that there will be no chip changing, its reprogrammable, and better yet it can be tuned on the go.