Millee brought Sally ('85 GL Westy) over to the house today. It's an Arizona van mostly -- I've never seen a desert car before, so I've never seen a VW where the overhead light wouldn't switch properly because the pivot pin and hole for the switch had worn to the point that the lever no longer had enough travel to move the contacts into, er, contact. And there were little bits of powdered Arizona in various places.

Millee's a fine young woman, btw, should improve any company including ours. And she didn't tell us, but she had an '82 air-cooled for a while.

It's a 300-kilomile-plus van with of course a great body, and something like 50k on its present engine. Typical hot-weather rot on connector boots and such. It has various issues that we'll be exploring further, but I'm pretty confident that we've taken care of the original complaint, which I'll summarize thus:

A) Won't crank sometimes. Later it will.

B) Driving along happy as a clam, it's chilly and the heater fans are both running (or not, but Millee thinks there's some correlation). Suddenly there's a sort of burning smell and a second or two later the motor quits. Later (maybe immediately or close to?) it will start again.

It's too early to call it proved, but I'm pretty confident that it's fixed -- so, a virtual cigar to whoever can tell me what was wrong. Any takers?

Yours, David