Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 06:51:38 -0600
Reply-To: Darrell Boehler <midwesty@MIDWEST.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Darrell Boehler <midwesty@MIDWEST.NET>
Subject: Re: Electrical Gremlin and more!
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Hi Phil,
You may have been heating up your ecu. Always make sure it has room for cool air to circulate around its heat sink. The
vanagon digifant ecu has the coil driver inside the ecu and generates lots of heat it needs to get rid of.
Darrell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Walker" <pwalker@NEXTDIMENGINEERING.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 12:11 AM
Subject: Electrical Gremlin and more!
> On a recent trip back from the ocean, I had an interesting occurrence. We
> had been driving all day on our way back to Utah without any incident, and
> all of a sudden I felt a slight hiccup in the motor. I had the cruise
> control on, and the hiccup kind of felt like it could have been a bump or
> just a figment of my imagination considering I had been driving all day, so
> ignored it and just paid closer attention to the van. Less than 5 minutes
> later, an identical hiccup occurred, only this time the van died completely.
> I pulled to the side on the road and figured we might have a cold night in
> the van, however when I turned the key, the van started right up. I thought
> maybe it had something to do with the cruise control so I left it off. To
> test my theory, I turned the cruise back on when I got to highway speed, and
> it hiccuped again. I shut the cruise off and it continued to hiccup and died
> a couple more times. We limped into the next exit where I opened the engine
> compartment in hopes that a plug wire or something was bouncing around back
> there. Desperately hoping for a solution in the frigid air I unplugged and
> replugged all of the connections I could see/get to (spark plug wires, any
> wiring harness connections) in hopes that maybe they had jiggled loose or
> possibly (I know this sounds crazy) the salt air had encouraged some
> corrosion in the connections. With 200 miles left to go to home I kept the
> speed at 60 and never turned the cruise back on...I had no hiccups. Has
> anyone seen a problems like this before. It sounds a bit trivial as I write
> this out, but when you are in the middle of nowhere on a cold night, it is
> no fun to have the van quit. I'm wondering if there is anything I can do fix
> this before the next trip. Thanks
>
> By the way, I have the window sticker from my 89 with all of the options
> (except Syncro) if anyone is interested in some history.
>
> Phil
> 89 Westy - 18,000 original miles
> Bountiful, UT
>
| 
