Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 14:51:58 -0700
Reply-To: Karl Wolz <wolzphoto@WORLDNET.ATT.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Karl Wolz <wolzphoto@WORLDNET.ATT.NET>
Subject: Re: review: reno area van shop for those desert breakdowns
Have you checked valve adjustment?
Karl Wolz
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Cochran" <rangerbrian@HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 1:32 PM
Subject: review: reno area van shop for those desert breakdowns
> Hello all! I spent the summer in the eastern sierras as a wilderness
ranger. On days off, I actually lived in and out of my vanagon. Things
were quite normal as usual, costing me about $250 per month in parts. The
fridge purred along most of the summer on both AC and gas. My Propane tank
wouldn't take a fill and forced me to replace it. I do love the van when it
just sits there, and doesn't have to go anywhere.
>
> If any of you remember, I was on the list much of last winter and spring
with postings about my "low oil pressure - partial engine rebuild - no
change after all together - damn vdo pressure gauge discovered to be the
root of the problem all along "....story. Well, I felt after I got
everything back together I wasn't getting the power I once had (now we're
talking vanagons here, so I use the term "power" lightly). On my drive down
to CA, my van got 18-20 mpg on the interstate, but once I hit the mountains,
I was getting 14 mpg and it was a real dog going up the slightest hill. I
felt I was a danger on the road for going so slow. Well, I found this place
in reno (2.5 hour drive from the rural area of bridgeport) call J & R VW
VANS that specialized in vanagons. So I brought the van there expecting to
figure out this problem of power loss.
> Now I don't want to go on a bash session of this place, quite the
opposite! They were nice, generally knowledgeable, and cheap as far as I'm
concerned. (no place is cheap anymore)
>
> But they were not tuned into 2.1 L in 84 vans (digijet). They wanted to
swap out my throttle body and intake manifolds, telling me I would have more
power if I did so. I never heard this before on the list. Their tune-up
didn't help me out. They checked a bunch of things, found a grounded out O2
sensor (didn't make a difference though?), and adjusted my too-rich
injection. (One worry was that they couldn't check HC, only CO. I'm not
sure what the real implications of that are, but I feel HC is important to
be know.)
>
> Well, after thinking about the "upgrade", I decided to go for it. I left
the white beast with them when I flew home for a wedding. (close to the
airport and lots of storage).
>
> Well, they put the throttle body in, and found that it didn't make any
difference (because of the limitation of the air meter). They took it out,
and after checking out all the other possibilities, I picked it up,
unchanged, with a $120 bill. I'm not too fond of that in retrospect, since
I paid $120 for nothing but storage. The airport would have charged $60.
The bummer is that they failed to hook up the throttle return spring, and
replace a sub par retaining clip on the step-down spring on the accelerator
linkage (Auto tranny). That clip failed on my drive home in the middle of
the night. The spring lost, I tied the linkage to the throttle with bailing
wire (and it seems to work better!)
>
> Upon returning to sea level, the van runs better. It was probably an
Altitude thing. I keep spending money on nothing. Why is that?
> Bottom line. J & R vw vans of Reno: great, unless you have some weird
non-stock set up.
>
> I go now.
> b
> 84 westy
> seattle
>
>
>
>
>
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