I suggest you advertise around for a good used Distributor for your 1.9 waterboxer. that would be a handy thing to have.. and pulling out your current one and popping in the new used one is not hard or difficult.

plus..with two distributors, you can take your time replacing the Hall Sender on the workbench on the distributor you're running now. On connections ... well...did you pull the plug off the Igniter and look at those connections carefully ? I keep Electrical Contact Cleaner around just for thing like this. Dielectric grease is handy to have around too.

Minor warning ..I had this happen once....I swapped in my spare Igniter ( you should have a back-up one of those two ) and in that process...'the white wire' ...the only wire that connects the entire Digijet fuel injection and the Distributor ... that wire got pushed back under the connector boot at the igniter. Took a while to figure that out. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

as you may know ..where the wires plug onto the side of the distributor ..it's very delecate there... that plastic plug gets brittle ..they are usually broken even. I have glued many of them back to the side of the distributor..the plastic plug part, which is part of the Hall Sender if you buy a new one.

you could try this...engine warm and idleing properly ..gingerly move the wires on the side of the distributor around some ..if it dies doing that...you know where to look.

also ...there are several ground wires just to the left of the Dist on the left head.. take those off and clean/re-do those. One of them is for the distributor .

oh ...I'll mention this ...my favoriate way to check for ignition pulse from the distributor is remove it ( or plug in another one, leaving the 'runner' one in place on the engine ) and ..and with it in your hand, but connected ... and key on, rotate the distributor with your fingers. each quarter turn you should get .. fuel pump energizes and runs a bit, if you have a NOID light on an injector wire it'll flash, if you're rigged up your coil wire to look for spark, you'll see a fat strong regular spark out of the coil.

Coil is a possibility ......my experience is they just get old and weak .and seldom fail outright.

when you have an intermittant failure .. you just keep at it, checking and improving as you go ...sometimes there is no 'ah ha that's it ! ' .. but ya gotta do something .. something logical, to advance the situation.

as far as I'm concerned, it's almost impossible to really be on top of waterboxer diagnosis without known-good test components.

heck....even in the air force, on a high-tech at the time jet interceptor .like a million dollar airplane, .that's what we did .. we had a whole truck full of tested and known-good black boxes ... and they were built to swap in and out easily ..one mounting screw. we were swapping those things in and out like crazy.

and we had a whole Mock-up ...an entire Radar/IR/computer / weapons system mocked up in a building ... so we could try black boxes and other parts of the system off the aircraft on a a mock-up system.....indoors , nice n' clean and warm and well-lit and so on.

and if one has two or more vanagons ..then it's nice to be able to try parts from your good van on your spare one.

one more thought ..'where to start' ..I recently had a no-start condition on a 1998 Volvo V70 ( nasty car to work on , never get one ) It started anytime, for months . Then I park it for 3 weeks ...in a damp environment. I just started checking, cleaning and re-doing grounds and all fuel injection related connections.. plus I had a camshaft position sensor off a parts car, and a Coil and Igniter ... I did them in that order... all the connections I thought had any bearing on the situation .. then the cam sensor ..then I finally got a spark out of it when I swapped out the Coil/Igniter combo. Gonna start that poor car once a week at least . Opps ..I almost wrote 'weak' ... That too , lol !

just start somewhere and do careful work. study the Bentley real carefully ..it's an odd book at first for sure. Scott

Scott

On 9/15/2015 3:14 PM, Eric Caron wrote: > Thanks everyone for all this great information. > > Of course, after reading all of it I’m no longer sure where to begin! At first it seemed like most thought it was a failing Hall Sender. then possibly a failing electrical connection. Or maybe the temp 2nd sensor or a leaky fuel injector. > > Also, this is very hard to diagnose as it only happens after a fairly long drive and only when the van is re started very quickly. Luckily even a 5 minute wait is enough to get it started normally again. > > My diagnostic skills are growing but limited at this point. So, I may have to wait until the problem becomes more evident. > > Still despite the cost I’m very tempted to replace the hall sender and keep my fingers crossed that I have the solution. > > So still contemplating my next action. I don’t have any known good spares of any of the mentioned parts to try. > > thanks again all and I’m keeping all this info handy as I move forward. > > Eric Caron > 85 GL Auto Westfalia > > > > >>>> On 9/14/2015 11:17 AM, James wrote: >>>>> oh..fwiw ..in all things car performance related ..I find poor >>>>>>>> connections being the real cause as much as a good 60 to 70 % of the >>>>>>>> time...and it being 'a component' that's bad the rest of the time. >>>>>>>> ...i.e. it's not 'always' A Component at all. >>>>> As someone who teaches electronics for a living, and has spent all of his driving lifetime dealing with "old cars" (our family fleet averages 18 years old!), I want to strongly echo this observation. Very strongly. Very, very strongly! >>>>> >>>>> Always check every electrical connection in a circuit. Never assume that 30 year old little plastic connector and it's aluminum or brass strips is still 'all right'. I had a Rabbit once that had a completely dead ignition system, due to a single bad crimp in a single relatively inaccessible plastic connector.... it was hard to reach, but surely that little wire was find, right??? >>>>> >>>>> James >>>>> Ottawa, ON >>>>>