Sound like the van is ticklish

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
Doug Fitz-Randolph
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 8:42 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: 1991 Vanagon sputters and blows black smoke on highway.

Another piece for the puzzle... happened as described several years ago. '90
Syncro. Symptoms identical. Switching ignition on/off no effect. Could go
months between occurrences, or sometimes it would happen two days in a row -
couldn't find any correlations. Disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.
Until two summers ago - after driving through an automatic car wash it came
back, lasted about 20 minutes, then passed. Now I can pretty reliably
reproduce behavior for $5 at any automatic car wash. The problem does not
occur after hand washing, during rainstorms, driving through standing water,
or even after thoroughly soaking everything with a hose in an attempt to get
it to happen. Go figure.

Doug Fitz-Randolph
Freeport, ME