Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 13:32:48 -0700
Reply-To: Brian Cochran <rangerbrian@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Brian Cochran <rangerbrian@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: review: reno area van shop for those desert breakdowns
Content-Type: text/html
<html><div style='background-color:'><DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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. </DIV>
<DIV> 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)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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.)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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!)</DIV>
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<DIV>Upon returning to sea level, the van runs better. It was probably an Altitude thing. I keep spending money on nothing. Why is that? </DIV>
<DIV>Bottom line. J & R vw vans of Reno: great, unless you have some weird non-stock set up.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I go now.</DIV>
<DIV>b</DIV>
<DIV>84 westy</DIV>
<DIV>seattle<BR><BR><BR></DIV>
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