Reply to: RE>Re: Buy British, not German
This VW Bus of mine has stranded me in more ways, and in more places....
Once every blue moon, you try to start it, and nothing happens. CLICK.
Then what you do, is you undo your keychain, leave the ignition key in, make
sure the @##$% thing isn't in gear, slide under the bus and start it with a
couple of keys across the solenoid.
I endured this for three years. Finally, it had the common decency to fail
in front of my house, on a Saturday morning. I went back in the house, made
up a couple of twenty-foot test leads, and started troubleshooting. Somehow, 5
Volts were being lost between the battery and the ignition switch. Rather than
go through some big troubleshooting thing, I just ran a pair of #12 wires from
the big plus battery cable, to the front of the bus. BINGO. NO more voltage
drop! Hopefully, it won't happen again. I'd already discovered that the
ignition key switch was bad, and had replaced it with a nice british-style
pushbutton on the dash. It seems that when these "bosch" starters start to go
bad, they start drawing LOTS of current through the solenoid-activator circuit,
and fry everything in that particular current path. After the bus stranded me
in L.A. ( and made me miss the Moss TR marque day :-( ), I replaced the
starter, but apparently there was yet something else fried besides the starter
switch....
The latest thing is the @#$%^ bosch fuel injection. It seems that there's
this box with a flap in it that monitors the incoming air flow. This tells the
electronics box how much air is coming into the system. The box responds by
varying the pulse width to the injectors. This box-with-flap could be
considered the heart of the fuel-injection system. There's a failure mode
where the flap gets STUCK at some position. In my case it was the full-open
position. CLOUDS of BILLOWING BLACK SMOKE out the tailpipe! URGH. Give me a
nice pair of SU carbs any day.
- Jerry
p.s. What I REALLY wanted was a Morris "Woody", but my wife insisted that we
didn't want another unreliable british collectors item...
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