| Good diagrams Antonye.
Disagree about the static though. Static builds up anytime you have two insulating materials rubbing together and can easily be tens of thousands of volts even when the current is so low that you would never feel it. It doesn't have to be the type of zap you sometimes get touching a handrail or doorknob to do damage to a chip. Just walking around you can build up a good old static charge, even in a garage.
When I was a computer engineer, we instigated the simple wearing of an ESD wriststrap (£3.99), there was a dramatic drop off in the number of 'faulty' chips and circuit boards we found, particularly in the intermittent faults. I wonder how many "bit of a fuelling problem at 6000rpm" type faults are caused by damaged chips that otherwise work perfectly except for the few bits of memory that hold this bit of the fuelling map, and how much time, frustration, trouble, expensive dyno time is spent tracking them down? I've read other threads about how such and such a chip is crap and people have set off on a chip hunt trying DP and JHP chips before settling on a FIM chip (or any combination). Now it may be that one type of chip actually is vastly superior, but I can't help wondering when I read things like that, about the care that was taken fitting the first few chips?
If you bought anything else for the bike for the price of a JHP chip (about £30), you'd make sure you didn't bollox it when you fitted it, so for the price of a £3.99 wriststrap it seems like cheap insurance.
Oooerrr, I need to get off my soapbox don't I...I'll get my coat.  |