[T3] gas mileage, voltage, etc.

[Jim Adney]

On 23 Jun 2017 at 13:41, Daniel Nohejl wrote:

> > Okay, that's a good thing to find. Do you need another SP connector?
> 
> No, I replaced the whole wire. A wire with as much resistance as mine
> wouldn´t fire the plug all that well at all, would it? In other words,
> was the likely cause of my miss or not? 

All the resistance is in the connector at the SP end. Our wires should be 
metal core and only need to be replaced if they get hard and the insulation 
cracks.

There's a wire-wound resistor molded into the brown SP connectors. These 
tend to fail at some point, leaving a gap that the spark must jump across. 
The gap in tiny at first, so the spark jumps that gap easily, but the gap grows 
as the spark erodes it away. Eventually it gets so large that the spark can't 
always jump across. The time between the first tiny gap and the appearance 
of running symptoms could be months, even on a daily driver.

I check each wire for ~1000 Ohms resistance every time I do a tuneup. This 
lets me catch failed resistors while the gap is still tiny and before there are 
any symptoms. Each of us should do the same, as it's easy to do while 
you're already in there and it saves a lot of grief.

Take a look at your plugs and see what they look like. If just #3 is black, try 
swapping it with #2 (because that's easy to get to.) It may clean up. If not, 
put in a fresh one. If they are all black, we need to look elsewhere for the 
cause.

Your distributor should be fine.

Try a different brain if things are still bad. Even the A would be better than a 
bad B.

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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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