Damaged Electrical Connector

[Plainmad]

My Zumo XT has developed an odd fault in that when I remove it from the cradle reinstall it it won’t always register it’s in the mount or if it does it when riding it will suddenly say that it’s lost electrical power and go to shut down. Normally moments later it will then regain power.
Taking it out and then back into the cradle checking the contacts are clean normally solves this until it is removed again (the sat nav normally stays on the bike unless its updating or I need to sort the rut issue for trips)

It’s got worse recently and a close examination of the contacts on the XT shows a small dark dot in the middle of one of them. I originally thought this was dirt but looking at it, it appears to be some of the contact is missing and I believe this is causing the poor connection.

Is this repairable with something like contact paint (even if such a thing exists as google searches just confuse me) or is there another option available

[danham]

It sounds to me like what happened is one of the contact pins in your mount got "tired" and made intermittent contact with the XT. That arcing produced the black spot. So my advice, if I've guessed the problem correctly, is to first make sure the corresponding pin on your mount moves freely and is clean, then clean the XT contact best you can and hope there is enough metal left to complete the circuit. To clean and protect there's nothing better than Deoxit. Yes, it's expensive, but so is a new mount or new XT.

-dan

[Plainmad]

Right so I’ve tried an electrical contact cleaner and from the first ride since it was fine. I’ll see how I get on and see if the black spot can be cleaned off but I’ve got a bad feeling it’s actually taken away some of the contact.

I’ll post a picture when I get a chance and let you see what I mean

[Peobody]

I had a cable pin failure. The pin is spring loaded, sliding in and out inside a sleeve. Mine looked like the sleeve had split allowing the pin to lay over. I could straighten it up and it would make contact and work, but it wouldn't stay. Fortunately I had an old style cable so Garmin replaced it with the new style at no charge.

BTW, try a pencil eraser on the black spot.

[Plainmad]

The rubber was an excellent shout and has got rid of the of black spot.
The two combined now mean that I’m not getting the loss of power anymore so thank you both for that.

However the contact on the back is damaged. Should I be worried and look at repairing it or just leave it and see how it gets on. If it’s repairable I’d rather crack on and do it rather than leave it till it can’t be repaired anymore.

Photo attached

PXL_20250427_092040480_Original.jpeg (844.8 KiB) Viewed 358 times

[danham]

My opinion is that the contacts on your XT are not repairable, but they can be cleaned and protected. The product I mentioned before, Deoxit, is used by pros in the music biz to keep contacts in mixing consoles clean and noise-free, because editing noise out of a mix costs lots of time and money. I carry it on all bike trips.

So the only repair I would do is a thorough cleaning with Deoxit cleaner and then a coating of Deoxit Shield to protect the contacts. Here's some info on Deoxit:

https://caig.com/help-learn/

-dan