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Date:         Fri, 21 Jun 1996 12:38:35 -0400
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         30erainey@sophia.sph.unc.edu (Eric Rainey)
Subject:      a 76 FI success story... (kinda long)

I've shared a lot of my problems here, might as well share some good news...

Was on my way to my girlfriend's for dinner. Just pulled on the interstate, went over a bump and boom, Maggie started missing. I think OK, last time I was in there I pulled off a plug wire and now it fell off. Maggie had plenty of power on just three cylinders (which reassures me that most everything is well back there), so I go to the next ramp and pull off.

Open the hatch, all plug wires secure (Damn, this is getting more complicated...). Start her up, trace the miss to #4. Jiggle all the FI wires, esp the injector wire to no avail. So I think, damn I'm hungry, it's too hot (we've had 90+F days lately, with typical SE US humidity...), and I'm hungry, so I nurse her home, call my girlfriend to say dinner's off on account of Maggie (an excuse often used; if she didn't own a bus too she might get suspicious). To top it off, my friend has come to visit me here for the first time. So we go eat, to make matters worse, he gets his bike stolen while we're in the restaurant (yall thought this was going to be good news...). Despite it all, my friend and I are having a rollicking time. But the night is not yet over. Go rent a movie, it sucks. We spill a certain something all over the floor (carpet, no retrieval :() But we get a good buzz on, the movie has its moments, and pretzals weren't bad.

Next day, get out idiot's guide, bently manual, go to work, After some time with the test lamp, VOM, and the loom, I isolate the problem to a bad wire there at the injector, no connection between the one terminus and no terminus at the main plug. I'm thinking now how am I gonna replace just one wire in that loom? Turns out, one of the wires has fallen off at the resistance block. Great I think, I'll just solder it back on. But damned if solder will NOT under any circumstances stick to the terminal on the resistor, and the excessive heat caused some of the resistor "stuff" to leak out. So I just kind of wrap the wire around it and put on some epoxy (man that stuff STINKS!) to hold the wire on. Success!!!

Weirdness: The Bentley manual says the way an injector works is a constant voltage is supplied thru the double relay and resitor to one of the injectors, and that the brain intermittantly supples ground, to operate the injector. So, based on this, if you hook your test lamp up to both terminals from that wire and operate the starter, you get flickering (and so I do). But should you ground one end of the lamp and probe the terminals of the wire, you should get one light and one dark. Wrong! Both light the lamp. What's up? I suppose further, should you hook one end of the lamp to 12V and probe the terminal that is supposed to intermittantly supply ground, you fry your brain, right ;-)

Ok, there's todays long story. Hope all yours end as well.

eric Maggie


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