[T3] gas mileage, voltage, etc.

[Daniel Nohejl]

Okay, Jim, on sending some new brains out this way. I fear we may not make it out to Madison at the rate we’re going!

Here’s an update: I messed with the idle speed screw a bit when trying to get the car to start earlier today since we had speculated yesterday that base idle speed would be off on account of the MPS hose having been loose the last time I set the idle. So from the get go, once warm and with the new brain, the idle speed was pretty high. I drove around to get the motor fully up to temp before trying to re-set idle speed. While driving, I experienced a lot of missing when hard accelerating in 2nd gear. Much more noticeable than a few days ago. When I finally tried to set the idle speed lower, it would intermittently miss quite a bit. Sometimes the idle speed would recover right away and other times it’d stay bogged down for a few seconds. After each miss or period of being bogged down, the exhaust stank of gasoline. 

I suspect this could still be an issue of the plugs being carboned up from my MPS hose mishap the other day. The #3 plug was pretty dark and I’d unplugged the injector for my ride around the neighborhood and home. Perhaps the others are even worse since they were all plugged in for the rich running while the MPS hose was off.  Didn’t get a chance to try to drive the plugs clean, but given our schedule in the next few days, it’d probably be easier to start out with new plugs. 

Or perhaps this is another bad brain? 

Ugh. 


> On Jun 24, 2017, at 3:13 PM, Jim Adney <jadney at vwtype3.org> wrote:
> 
> On 24 Jun 2017 at 14:15, Daniel Nohejl wrote:
> 
>> Bluntly put, WTF? How does this happen?
>> 
>> I just installed my last B brain and am about to drive more than 3k
>> miles to Oregon in a little over a week...... 
> 
> My best guess is that some of the brains I've bought came via ebay over the 
> years. There was at least one purchase of a bunch of them, but they're all 
> mixed now. I've gone thru most of them and quick checked each of them, but 
> they never got any long term testing like you've done. It's conceivable that 
> someone collected a bunch of bad ones over the years and then sold them 
> to me. But that seems unlikely, since bad ones would usually be exchanged 
> for rebuilds from Bosch.
> 
> The only other possibility is that there is something weird about your car that 
> tends to kill them. I don't know what this might be, but it remains a possibility. 
> What if the Teflon insulated wire that was used on your aftermarket FI wiring 
> harness was poorly chosen? Teflon has a tendency to "cold flow" and it's 
> possible that would allow an unfused 12 V hot wire to short out to something 
> in the brain that couldn't take that amount of voltage or available current.
> 
> This means that I should soon have 2 bad ones from you. If I have time to do 
> post mortems on them, that might tell me something.
> 
> I'll send you a couple more and you can bring the bad one here when you 
> stop in Madison.
> 
> -- 
> *******************************
> Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
> Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> *******************************
> 
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