Show of Hands-HOw many people have had an MSD magnetic pickup fail???

[TButtrick]

Sorry in advance to any MSD fans but I'll tell this story any chance I get. I suspected I had a bad 6AL box and went through the troubleshooting procedure in their site to confirm. I'm a EE and specialized in multi level PCB repair and troubleshooting in the military so I figured I'd take look and try the repair myself. I drilled out the four corner rivets and opened the box to find a fried zener and other accompanying power circuit related devices that failed. After looking a little closer I noticed that the overall quality of the PCB build up was a bit on the sloppy side and not what I would expect from MSD.

The picture below is the populated side of the PCB. The top two circles are failed devices and the third circle between those is an empty through-hole on the side of a step-up transformer, that rectangular thingy. Transformers are inherently heavy devices. That hole is on either side of the xformer and designed in for a screw that holds a bracket around the xformer which is not installed here and never was. You can see the other side of the board in the second pic and the same holes on either side of the rectangular device. Pretty common cost saving cut to leave it out but at the cost of quality. The only thing attaching the xformer to the PCB are the leads from it to the board so its actually floating in the PCB cut-out. In a vibrating environment, it's only time before it fails at the lead. I sent the whole thing back and was returned with the sticker attached in the third pic. The choice is yours.

[elmariachi]

Originally Posted by TButtrick

When your products fail SO FREQUENTLY that you have to have this type of decal pre-printed, there is a serious quality control problem. Personally I have had one new 6AL and one new magnetic pickup fail in 8k miles. The web is full of forum discussion about MSD failures.

Here is their CEO: Dan Gresham | LinkedIn