boschman2

why I was rebuilding the circuit board I thought I'd use as many new parts as possible but if you guys think these are pretty reliable then I'll just leave them alone. I want to thank everyone who helped me figure this out.

Ok, so caps it is then.

hotwaterwizard, No, no writing at all. The board is pretty blank as you can see by the pic.

ANTE, here's a pic of the whole board. You can see 3 of the blue mystery parts in this pic but there are actually 5. The other 2 are hidden behind that ribbon cable.

Also BMW - Germany- Siemens, make sense? Yeah I thought this too because the circuit board is made by VDO which is a Siemens company. I dont know if Siemens owned VDO at the time the board was made which was circa 1985 but either way, they're both german. So even though the part has "100nS" on it you still think it means "100nF" ? Thats the only thing that makes me hesitate. I wonder why they just didnt put "100nF" on it instead of the "nS"

AN920: How sure are you that the part is a 100nF cap ?? Ante: Yeah, I could get a picture of the entire circuit board. The board is only about 5 inches square and it has a total of 5 of these mystery parts on it. I'll try and find I pic to upload and then I'll post the pic.

I was having problems with the cars instrument cluster. The batteries inside the cluster were dead so I was rebuilding the circuit board with new batts and new capacitors and wanted to replace as many parts as I could while I had the cluster apart since its 20 years old. Thats when I tried to identify the part you see in the pic in my initial post. I'd still like to figure out exactly what that little sucker is. When i test it with the ohm meter i get 1.2M ohms.

I dont know Hotwaterwizard, you might be right too. I didnt think this part would be this difficult to identify. I appreciate everyones responses so far. Any thoughts on whether or not I could just leave the part off and use a bridge instead ? I guess thats hard to answer if we dont even know what the part is, huh ?

Audioguru maybe on to something with his "polyfuse" hypothesis because I found this http://www.electronicsforu.com/electronicsforu/Articles/ad.asp?url=/EFYLinux/efyhome/cover/sep2004/PolyFuse.pdf&title=PolyFuse:%20A%20New%20Standard%20For%20Circuit%20Protection. I wonder if I could just bypass this little part all together ?, just put a bridge in its place ?

Hotwaterwizard When you said you had a similar component on a crossover for a tweeter, are you referring to that small, beige colored, 2 prong part that is on the circuit board in the pic you included in your post ?? thanks in advance.

can someone tell me what part this is ? I need to purchase more of these or an equivalent part. This part is probably about 20 years old so I'm not sure if its even available anymore. It came from a circuit board in an instrument cluster out of a BMW car. I assume the 100ns means 100 nanoseconds ?