Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 22:43:03 -0700
Reply-To: Don Hanson <dhanson928@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Don Hanson <dhanson928@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: No start/ Yes spark II
In-Reply-To: <0f8b01cc9aaa$0ba45a60$6401a8c0@PROSPERITY>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
eading.
>
> you thought about or considered ALL grounds in the van ?
> I have seen *the weirdest stuff you ever dreamed of' ...from a poorly
> conduction battery ground.
> The ground side of all DC circuits are just as important as the power side.
> and grounds for the fuel injection are super important.
> as simple a thing as the distributor harness ground not making good contact
> can make cause no ignition.
>
>
> Scott
>
I am now at about Jr. High School level, learning about electrics as they
pertain to recreational equipment, mostly toys, but Vanagons and stuff, too.
A year ago, I was working with a couple of my 'pre-do it right'
jobs...trying to make my Wells Cargo trailer work on my wife's horse
trailer plugin...and make her horse trailer work on mine....
No matter what I did with changing wires around in the vehicle
plugs....the Wells Cargo trailer was absolutely weird....sometimes the
wrong blinker going on , sometimes the brake lights...etc etc... This, of
course, was during the first snowstorm of winter when we were trying to get
away...and I am working in the freezing slush...cursing and thinking of
Baja or points south.
So I went online and followed a 'trouble-shooting for trailer lights'
Wiki entry, or some such.....the first thing they said was "strange
behavior in most trailer wiring can be traced to faulty grounds......Boy
Howdy! were they right. The ground on the one tow vehicle was
'intermittent' and the one on the trailer was all corroded....cleaned them
up and every light worked perfectly.....well, except one taillight that
also had a corroded bulb socket.
That was my 'elementary school' graduation....Now I check (all) the
grounds right after I see if all the actual wires are still there, on any
circuit....
The ground on my temperature gauge sender was loose, too...in the
vanagon...I went cuckoo with that giving me all kinds of weird readings, at
a time when I was doubting my cooling system...The temperature gauge is a
'slow' gauge....on my van anyhow. It doesn't just flip over to full hot or
full cold when the connection is made or lost....it takes a few
minutes.....So my temperature gauge would start to read really low, then
come up to normal, then low, at unpredictable intervals, when I knew
everything was fine. First I swapped in a good spare gauge, still
weird.......I finally found, buried under a bunch of sloppy wiring work, a
tiny little brown wire and traced it back to the temperature sender...that
wire was the ground, and it was loose on the block....
I have a "new" (2000 VFR) fuel injected Honda motorcycle. This
particular model is known for having rectifier problems and the accepted
fix is to clean the electrical connections often...even the slightest extra
resistance causes them to fail, but if kept clean, they do not fail...
Important things, Ground wires...
Don Hanson
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