Great first post. Welcome to the list!

Unfortunately, I cannot help you. But, I have an '87 w/ an automatic as well
that I have yet to drive! Soon!

Good luck!

On Nov 26, 2007 3:27 PM, James Reed-Jones <jjones04@uoguelph.ca> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> So I have been meaning to introduce myself (instead of just lurking)
> and since I have had my first official van disaster I thought I would
> kill two birds with one stone.
>
> 3 months ago my wife and I bought an 87 westy and have been in love
> with it ever since. I just recently found out about this list and
> subscribed - let me tell you this place has been so useful already! (I
> cant believe the oil filler extends!)
>
> All that being said - I had my first disaster with the van today. I
> was out picking my wife up and I started loosing power and couldn't
> keep the RPMs up above 1200. It was like I was trying to start in the
> highest gear. The weird thing though is that it would do it even when
> I put it in neutral. I kept having to pull over and restart the
> engine. This would solve the problem for anywhere between a few blocks
> to not at all. The one thing that I did do to limp it home was that
> every time I lost power I would stomp the pedal which seemed to give
> me back a burst of power and doing that I was able to rocket myself
> along with the occasional boosts of speed.
>
> Other info - 1987 vanagon westy
> - Automatic tranny
> - It first started while the engine was warming up but continued after
> it had gotten up to the regular running temp
> - I live in Ontario Canada and today it was blizzarding a nice wet
> slushy snowfall (as an aside I hope Santa brings me winter tires)
> - A similar kind of thing happened once before on a cold damp morning
> but it just happened once then went away.
>
> Any ideas I could check out prior to taking it to a mechanic would be
> great - or if this has been discussed in the list before a keyword to
> do a search for would be great!
>
> Thanks everyone,
>
> James
>

--
Chris
88 Vanagon GL (daily driver)
87 Westfalia (in progress)
http://wavanagon.googlepages.com/