To begin with you need to determine of it oil, fuel, or water. If it is
consistent when only under load I would start with checking the crankcase
ventilation. Yes, too much oil can also cause a problem. Pull off the hose
from the breather to the air boot and the boot. If there are signs of a lot
of oil then you are pushing the oil out through there and into the intake
tract. The oil level should be between the marks on the dipstick. The top
mark is not the full mark. It is the maximum do not exceed not matter what
mark. Oil and filter change = 4.5 quarts. Bad rings or valve guides will
usually cause smoking at idle.

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
Steve Young
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 11:14 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: 84 Vanagon Intermittent Smoking

Hi List,

I'm having a weird problem with my westie. It has 1.9 wb engine that until
January was running well. It was parked up for about 6 weeks until a bad ecu
was diagnosed and replaced. Since then under a bit of load it will suddenly
throw out a plume of smoke out of the exhaust, a very large and embarassing
plume of smoke. It's done this twice in the past six months that I've
noticed. Today when it happened I noticed a slight loss of power and glanced
in the rearview mirror. I parked the van and started it up again after a few
hours it smoked and power was uneven under throttle for a few minutes then
righted itself. The engine sounds fine. I took it to a mechanic after the
first time it happened and he suspected a stuck valve. That said the engine
sounds fine even when disgorging lots of burnt oil. No rattles, or
backfires.

One potentially common factor is that the first time it happened was shortly
after an oil change. Yesterday I noticed it was near low and threw in a
litre of oil. Could too much oil cause these symptoms? Other factors I'm
considering are valves, rings and ECU.

Any ideas and advice appreciated.

Steve

P.S. engine is a VW rebuild of unknown age, van has 360,000 Km