[T3] Mysterious squareback condition

[Keith Park]

When the distributor in my Opel was REALLY shot, it would have an
intermittant complete cutting out, grounding the case with a separate wire
solved that... a couple years later it has an intermittant low RPM miss
under power, I sold it but the new owner found the problem to be the worn
distributor again, not sure what the exact issue was at that time but it had
nearly 200Kmi on it.
Keith


On 26 Jan 2011 at 13:50, J. Jonik wrote:

> Can someone explain why grounding the distributor at the condenser screw
> fixes this problem?    Is some other ground not working? 

Adding that wire would only fix the problem if the distributor body was
somehow 
no longer getting grounded to the engine case. Given the way it's mounted, 
that's extremely unlikely. It's more likely that something else, perhaps 
inadvertently at the same time, fixed the problem.

It's easy to bump a wire or change the timing, or maybe just loosening and 
retightening the dist clamp did the trick.

It's certainly true that the dist body must be grounded for the ignition to 
work. I've never seen or heard of that being a problem.

He could test this fix by carefully disconnecting the case end of his wire
and 
seeing if the engine still runs.

-- 
Jim Adney
jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, WI USA

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