The miner with run just fine without heatsinks, it will work for a few seconds then it will overheat and will give you a temp-error in the kernel log and goes to sleep or on some models it would just enter a reboot-loop, I think what you are describing is the chip itself is loose in respect to the PCB, and that my friend is most likely the reason.

@danieleither, I can tell you for a fact that in most cases, the bad boards will die during a power recycle, mainly caused by what's known as "thermal shock," the rapid change of temp will crack poor solder joints, the miner is more likely to break when it goes from hot to cold than staying hot, you already had at least one badly soldered chip, when you powered the miner off temp changed very rapidly from 70c or so to near room temp, what happened there is uneven shrinking of different components, the result is a mechanical stress on the chips to the PCB, so now there is a "short" in that hashboard and thus it's reading 0 asics whereby in reality it could be just 1 bad ship that needs resoldering, funny enough, this shit only happens on Antminers, it was very common on their 17 series in general and anything with a T is usually terribly made by Bitshit.

If you are still deep into mining and using Antshit, you may consider getting a fixture tool and some tools to start fixing your own hashboards, if you don't have shaky hands, I believe you are smart enough to figure it out.