[MR2] MK2 Power Steering Relay

[Dennis McFayden]

Donald,
 
The relay is a little tricky in this car. The thing will work fine for a long time, several months. Then there will be one occasion where it will not work. In that case what you say below will work. 
 
A couple of days ago the after several drives the relay still did not engage. When I got home in the evening I was going to pull a code. When I did that it didn't show any error code. Guess what? When I started the car again everything was fine. I guess the fifth time, it might have been more that day, was the trick. I have decided to fix that problem. 
 
The Panasonic relay specs see to be fine up to about 70 amps. No peak current is specified. I did see a very similar relay from Omron that had a 150 amp peak current rating  but only a 40 amp carrying current. Both relays were available from Digi-key for about the same price. The Omron is of domestic manufacturer, not sure if that means a lot in this case. 
 
Dennis
 
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:43:02 -0500
From: "Donald Chalfant" <dkchal at datasync.com>
To: "MR2 Email" <mr2 at mr2.com>
Subject: Re: [MR2] MK2 Power Steering Relay
Message-ID: <C8A045A29A8940C3ACBD0912AF70BEEF at lucky>
Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="iso-8859-1"

Dennis, the trick for years has been to turn the ignition switch on and off (no starting) rapidly about 12 times to free the corrosion on the contacts in the relay.  Its always been good for me.  
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Dennis McFayden 
  To: Rand E ; MR2 Email 
  Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 12:31 AM
  Subject: Re: [MR2] MK2 Power Steering Relay