I am having a problem that is driving me crazy.  I recently got a '90
Vanagon in for head gasket replacement.  It had broken down on the road and
the customer had it towed here.  I looked it over and found that it needed
head gaskets, and when I pulled the heads, I saw that they needed to be
replaced as well.  The van also got a new exhaust system (used old cat and
oxygen sensor).  I did all of these repairs and everything went well.  I put
on brand new AMC heads, new gaskets, new distributor cap and rotor, new
plugs, new temp II sensor, new thermostat and housing, and a bunch of new
hoses.

Now that everything is back together everything is working great except for
one very annoying problem.  The van hesistates very badly from a standing
start to about 15-20 mph.  After that there is no hesistation and the van
runs smooth and goes down the road smoothly.  It feels like one of the
cylinders is intermittantly firing and not firing and then finally kicks in
like a turbo boost after you get over 15-20 mph.  I checked all of the plugs
and they look fine (they are new).  I checked the valve adjustment and set
all of the valves to zero lash (just touching).  I swapped in a known good
ECU from another van and this actually stopped a racing idle but didn't fix
the hesistation problem.  When the van is idling, it idles a little funny
too.  If you sit and listen to it, it goes from what I would call a "normal"
(kind of loping for the Vanagon) to a more of a machine gun sound
(ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, etc).  The machine gun idle sounds to me like one of the
cylinders is intermittantly not firing.  I haven't checked compression yet
(I'll do that tomorrow) but you would think that if it was a compression
problem that this would happen at high or low speeds.

I know it is probably something very obvious but it is escaping me at the
moment.  Any ideas?  You folks have helped me many times in the past and I
really appreciate it.  I try to do the same.  Any ideas would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
Ken Wilford
John 3:16
http://www.vanagain.com
http://www.strictlyvwauctions.com
Phone: (856)-327-4936
Fax: (856)-327-2242