All of your high grade electrical contacts are plated. Copper alone corrodes, though you can limit this with dielectric grease.  

Sanded is certainly the wrong word- cleaning with isopropyl alcohol is the industry standard for electronics- and the Vanagon ECU and all fuel injection falls into that category.

 I'm going to clean all the contacts with an old toothbrush and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.  
This is preventive maintenance also. Since ECU signals are low voltage into the millivolt range, slight resistance due to corrosion or dirt can affect the performance of the system.  
And  
. There are products that can be sprayed on that preserve the contacts as an alternative to grease -I haven't used any yet.  

Robert K
1982 Westfalia
- Jack wrote:

<<Some generic comments regarding electrical contacts.

If you are lucky enough to have gold flashed/coated contacts, do NOT use
an abrasive cleaner.  You'll just take off the gold.

Someone recently stated that he "sanded" his contacts and I shuddered.
Most contact systems will have *some* sort of coating over the copper, tin
or whatever.  But it's apt to be thin (tin costs $).  Why sand it off?  If
an abrasive is still necessary after solvent or chemical cleaning, a
pencil eraser usually works ok.

Of course, heavy current (or cheap) copper/copper/lead contacts are
another story.

As has already been recommended, the silicon grease products do work even
though it may seem counter-intuitive to put an insulating grease directly
onto the contact surfaces.  I understand the metal/metal pressure
displaces the grease at the micro-contact interfaces. And yes a tube does
last a long time; I have an old tube of Dow-Corning stuff which is
probably older than many of the list readers.  :-)>>

//JackHolen Sie mehr aus dem Web. Unter http://explorer.msn.de/intl.asp#de gibt es einen KOSTENLOSEN Download von MSN Explorer.