Identifying Nichicon Caps on Honda Instrument panel

Newbie here. I have my Honda dashboard instrument cluster’s circuit board on my bench. It has 3 different type of Nichicon caps. I have the voltage and UF values, and can measure the physical dimensions with my micrometer.

I think the caps are of the UPS or UPN series. But how do I bullseye exactly what series they are? One of them has KME on the side. Do I need to worry about impedance?

Any help appreciated. I hope this question is in the correct forum and not too stooopid…

-Ken

Hello,

Yes. It is a hard challenge on the question about impedance and changing out specific capacitors. The KME could be a United Chemicon series. I did not see this series listed on the website. Usually the series is stamped on the capacitors. If it is not if can be a guessing game. It would depend on how the Engineer has used some of these parameters in the design . Usually without knowing what capacitor is for sure, I tend to go to the lower impedance or ESR series and size. In most cases this should work. Sometimes it has to be trial and error as I am sure Honda will not provide the schematic with the actual part numbers used. We do have a lot of good information on the Forum about capacitors and Impendance that you can review.

Verna,

Thanks for the quick reply! My problem is the high beam indicator lamp will not light. I’ve bought a used 2006 CR-V with several problems, and am fixing them one at a time. Five of ten PC74 bulbs were burned out in the cluster. So I pulled the cluster and replaced all ten incandescent bulbs for LED’s. Nine of the ten bulbs work, with the high beam indicator still FUBAR. I’ve checked the high beam socket with both LED and incandescent bulbs, noting the the LED’s are polarized. Still no joy. I have the Honda electrical service manuals and once the cluster is back in the car I will back-probe the positive and negative feeds for this circuit. It looks like the high beam lamp is on a positive power bus, with a dedicated switched negative. If back-probing the multi-pin connector shows good power and grounds (with headlights in high beam) then it’s the circuit board. Otherwise it’s a harness problem. A certain segment of the harness is suspect in my mind, under the dash. I need to look for cuts/abrasions/water penetration etc.

I read that I should check the system board for visual problems, and reflow the solder if needed. There’s two pins on a 22 pin connector that are suspect (I’m thinking of reflowing them regardless). It’s a switched (-) design for the lamp, and it may be a wiring harness problem which I will investigate soon.

While the cluster is out of the car, and I was checking traces, pins, bulbs, and sockets I inspected the caps. It is 16 years old, and probably lead free. The caps look good, and I doubt they are a problem. I’m just pondering whether to change them on the safe side.

I really don’t want to have to pull the caps to get their model number.

Any thoughts appreciated.

-Ken

It gets to be very hard to troubleshoot something as it appears it might not be the capacitors on the e-mail you have sent now. Unfortunately I would not know the capacitors that are in this part. It would require pulling them out. There could be so many different issues . You would need a meter to start checking some of the possible issues. There are a lot of articles and Youtube videos you can check out and see if there is something on the issue you are having.

Verna,
Thanks for all the help. What type of meter are you referring to?

I’ve buttoned up the instrument cluster, and will put it back in the car. I’ll do the back probing to see if the circuit is closed when I flash the high beams.

In time if I need to re-cap the board I’ll pull the caps and positively identify them.

More tests to do until it I can call it a bad board.

Thanks for all the help!

-Ken