btr214

My Jeep has 360k miles and has had issues, intermittently, from the moment I bought it. Previous owner had same type issues, installed external voltage regulator work-around prior to selling it to me. When I got it, i began having issues and took it in to have it looked at. Mechanic found some grounding issues that he fixed and was able to remove the external regulator and it worked fine for a while (a year or so). It began having random weird symptoms. It would randomly shut off while driving, randomly throw error codes and dash indicators while driving and randomly stop charging the battery while driving to the point where, if the trip was long enough, the battery would die and it would shut off when it drained enough. I don't have a lot of hard evidence for this, but anecdotally, it seemed to be more pervasive when it was hot outside and when the vehicle was warm. Cold mornings and cold-starts seemed to reduce the prevalence.

The previous owner had also bought, and provided with sale, an extra PCM. When the truck began having these issues, I would swap back and forth between the two units and it would resolve for a time, sometimes hours, sometimes weeks. I also noticed that if i got under the hood and wiggled the connectors going into the PCM, it would also provide some relief. After doing some basic research, i found a guy that built a bracket to compress the connectors into the PCM, because he claimed that the connectors could become loose over time and fail to make good contact with the pins and providing extra force would help make more firm contact. I altered this concept and bought 3 snake clamps and wrapped them around the PCM and each connector and tightend them down. This resolved every single random symptom I was experiencing, and this "fix" has lasted for about 3 years.

A few days ago, the truck very briefly stalled while driving down the road, then when I stopped a few minutes later (for an unrelated issue, at the time, i didn't think anything of the brief hiccup) it would turn over, but not crank. After fiddling with it for about 45 minutes and calling for a tow, it suddenly cranked and got me about 5 miles down the road until it suddenly died again. Rinse, repeat a couple more times as I tried to get to where I was going. An oh, BTW, everytime I went under the hood to fiddle, I noticed that the PCM was incredibly hot. I'm not 100%, but I don't believe that the PCM should be getting too hot to touch, which it was.

I took it to the shop and they ordered a new (It might have been refurbished, i'm not sure) PCM, but the new PCM did not resolve the problem. It would still sometimes crank and run fine, then randomly just die. Sometimes seconds, sometimes an hour or more.

I found a youtuber who had repaired this particular PCM model's header going into the voltage regulator located behind the front plate, claiming that he has found many "faulty" PCMs simply had bad solder joints where the header mounts to the board. Thinking this sounded a lot like the kind of thing that would lead to most of the symptoms I had experienced, I took mine apart to give his repair a go. I found that my header solder connections were fine, however, the soft gel that is placed over the voltage regulator board was discolored sigificantly on the right side, and the firmer gel that fills the rest of the PCM cavity was melted away slightly around the area opposite where the voltage regulator faces the rest of the PCM when together. It's apparent that the section of the VR in question was overheating, but upon close inspection, I don't see any obvious component failures, however, one transistor has some corrosion where it sits on the board, although I can't see a specific source of this corrosion; it appears to originate from up under it.

I have images of these things, but I am having issues with the add photo function of the forum, so here's the link to the album: Jeep PCM photos

Thanks for the help in advance.

Bryan