[Monkey Wrench]

since you obviously have a good electrical background and seem to feel you need to buy a DME , how might you feel about just going to an electronics shop and buying comparable electrolytic capacitors and soldering them in?

what I did before ( on a ford bosche ECU) was clip the cans about 1/ 8" or so above the board. Watch you dont get squirted with the stuff. it might be PCB's or something real bad for your eyes.

on your new cans, wrap each lead around a pin so its like a spring , then slide them over the stubs and solder, the reason I did that was because I'm a little afraid of the tiny soldering. it also avoided needing to muck with the heat putty to work on the solder side of the baord.

the capacitors have a line on the can indicating negative, don't get them in backwards.

does the board also have a diode? maybe they woulld be easy to check or replace.

I dont know if it will help, but worth a go maybe? whats to loose? the ability to have it exchanged? maybe?

the caps are cheap and at around 35 years old , well they do tend to expire , fail leak their stuff..

try to look on the board just below them. Ive seen where they leak their electrolytic fluid causing a light stain just below the component ( capacitor) on the board.. Sometimes they bulge out at the ends, a physical sign of failure.

the caps are very cheap, the board isn not. its a bit of a crapshoot, sure.

I blew one up in a volvo once, there it is called an ECU, it did not like the fact I'd somethow got the polarity at the battery, or a charger wrong, the board made a POP sound, I had a spare I did not try to find out what had popped, likely just one component? for sure that F-UP blew my ECU.

the actual fiunctionality of the thing at board level, thats way beyond this guy but I'd change caps, maybe save some cash if you are lucky? likely the right guy could check things like transistors or diodes and indeeed resistors. the chips and or Eproms remain mysterious little things to me ..

electrostatic discharge (static shock) can blow the Eprom You can ground yourself with a wrist strap to prevent discharging a static shock. That can wipe them out.

thinking maybe someone before you made a little mistake , cables backwards or accidentally "shocked" the E-prom / microchip

those might put it in "won't start mode"

possibly looking at the actual components closely could show something burned.



how about listen to the others ( above) who are much more knowledgable and then as a last resort , after you have tried everything you know or wwere prompted to , just before you go spend a thousand or so, where there is not much else to loose, then try a "re-cap" ?