[T3] gas mileage, voltage, etc.

Daniel Nohejl d.nohejl at gmail.com
Mon Jun 26 11:46:19 PDT 2017


Ok! As predicted, we're not out of the woods at all and the car is actually running worse now than it has at any point since I started posting about it last week or so!!!

Once the motor was more warmed up today, we had a periodic miss at idle and plenty of intermittent missing on the highway. Wiggling individual wires above the trigger points reproduced the miss. After removing them from the connector again, we verified that one of them was making loose contact on its pin so we tightened that one and left the other two alone. Also, one of the wires looks like this, with some of the insulation peeling back. I know it’s probably not a big deal, but I’m grasping at straws here:

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/album_page.php?pic_id=1660062

Then, we checked injector connections and got a surge in idle when we moved the wires for #3. Went to check tightness and found that one of them looks pretty bad and isn’t really fitting well into the female connector:

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/album_page.php?pic_id=1660063

The connectors themselves were tight enough so we left them be. We then let it idle for a while and it’d miss once every few minutes. We couldn’t reproduce it with any more wire testing so we went into a store. We came out, started up the car, and it idled weakly but not roughly. Driving away, it was underpowered and had the familiar shudder of running on less than 4 cylinders. Exhaust stank like gas. Verified spark through all the wires. Everything was fine. Unplugged each injector plug. The idle dropped further. So the injectors are injecting and the spark plug wires are working. But maybe the plugs are fouled again. 

On the way home, it was painfully slow off the line and the engine shuddered. Sometimes, full power would kick back in for a few seconds and we’d drive fine, then it would go away. I struggled to get over 30mph on the way home. Our clothes reek of rich exhaust. 

Too flustered to figure out what the best next move is. 



> On Jun 25, 2017, at 14:48, William J <catnine09 at dslextreme.com> wrote:
> 
> If I recall you replaced the engine FI harness . When we talk about intermittent shorts or even open circuits that are intermittent . where does the new engine harness connect to the body harness ? I  imagine since the power relay is the main source from the brain to the chassis plus the ground from the fuel pump relay to the brain is about it. I don't recall if you looked at those connections , think you have. I would check where they connect maybe 3 wires .
> 
> Also does you car have the cold start relay ? I only ask because the Bentley only shows a basic harness not wire by wire as the later models . I don't know where the cold start rely is located on your car yet looking at the page17  system #32 &33 go to the cold start valve yet on the throttle pressure switch there are 14 & 9 yet # 34 is on 14 and # 34 is also on the cold start rely. That is the only place I see # 34 . Since they don't show the actual wires and you've had issues in that area before per the pressure switch and if you still have the old harness perhaps see what #34 does. # 34 does not go to the brain yet 14 and 9 do , if #34 is somehow tied to #14 the relay itself might be an issue internally. It's just a thought .
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Nohejl" <d.nohejl at gmail.com>
> To: <type3 at vwtype3.org>
> Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 8:18 AM
> Subject: Re: [T3] gas mileage, voltage, etc.
> 
> 
>> 
>>>> So should I just check the spark plugs for "fouling" before moving on
>>>> to investigating "hard" FI components for issues?
>>> 
>>> Yes.
>>> 
>>> Another thing to check would be to look for stray wire strands that didn't get
>>> caught in the crimp, either in the brain connectors or out at the engine end.
>> 
>> 
>> I pulled all the spark plugs and found an interesting pattern. 1 and 4 were “fouled” and 2 and 3 were pretty white, despite the fact that on Friday #3 looked like 1 and 4 in these pics.
>> 
>> 1 and 4
>> 
>> https://www.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/1659498.jpg
>> 
>> 2 and 3
>> 
>> https://www.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/1659499.jpg
>> 
>> I replaced all of them since I didn’t have enough of the same heat range to just replace 1 and 4. The ones in the pics are B5HS and I replaced them with B6HS. I also recalled (correctly I hope) that the trigger points fire 1/4 and 2/3 as pairs and that the condition of my plugs followed that. The connector from the harness to the trigger points has seemed fairly loose. I discovered last week during diagnostics that it could be wiggled off the trigger points with little effort. I removed the connectors from the plug and tightened them up ever so slightly and got a good snug fit when plugging it back in.
>> 
>> I went for a drive around the neighborhood and nothing was awry…..no missing and no weird idling. However, it took a bit of driving for things to go wrong yesterday so there’s still every chance that the problem will return. Should I have issues again, does it seem that today’s discovery means I should replace the trigger points? Or is what I found more of a coincidence?
>> 
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