____________________________________
 From: Dvdclarksn
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Sent: 6/6/2009 5:24:37  P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Rich running  condition-RESOLVED!(long)

The rich running condition that I have been  struggling with has been
fixed. The problem ended up being a short in the wire  to the grounding sheath on
the wire from the O2 sensor to the computer. I  should have honed in on
this sooner as the problem occurred when the ECU went  from closed loop to open
loop (is that correct or do I have that reversed?)  after about 45 seconds
from starting/restarting. I did spend some time getting  really grounded
(bad, very bad pun) with my vehicle by cleaning up all of the  grounding points
as well as replacing at least 3 spade connectors in the  engine
compartment. This should be on every vanagon owners annual checklist,  Check the
conditions of all wires, ground points and wire connectors  everywhere that you
can access especially in the engine compartment. So many  problems  can be
corrected and prevented by doing this on these vehicles.  VW knew this when
they put out a bulletin advising gold connections in many  areas of the vehicle
(found this on Alldata). Thanks to everyone on the list  that responded and
corresponded with me on this issue especially Dennis, Mark  (advised
checking the O2 sensor wire) and Ken. I spent a good bit of quality  time on this
problem but just not in the correct order. Sometimes you  remove the engine
hatch and get distracted on something else that you see or  work off of
various hunches and can't see the forest for the trees. In the  future if  see a
wire that is bent at an odd angle like this one was  I will assume that
wire may be bad and replace it with a new connector. I kept  getting distracted
with what appeared to be a light blue corrosion on the  connector  for the
Temp II sensor. I thought that this might be changing  the resistance and
eventually the mixture like a bad sensor will. All my  connections that go to
the ECU and their corresponding ground wires/points are  shiny clean and the
van has never run smoother. What I thought were just RPM  variations from
wear in the distributor or problems with an old Hall unit were  probably
constant input changes to the ECU and the corresponding blips in the  idle level
as readings kept changing. Sorry for all the details here but maybe  it
will help someone else that has a similar problem. Thanks again to the list
for all of the very likely, plausible explanations for this problem.

David Clarkson
90 Westy (265k-smooth sailing again)

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