Bob, wow, I am glad you got your van back on the road, but this mechanic
must be burnt out on the Advance Auto/Autozone rebuilds.  Yes these can
be cheesy and crappy.  However Bosch "rebuilt" stuff is more like
"remanufactured".  I mean the "rebuilt" distributor from them is really
a brand new unit.  The body is new, it has a new hall unit in it and I
really haven't found the part that they reuse in it yet (maybe the shaft
in the middle?).  I have gotten "rebuilt" distributors for my Ford
pickup from Advance Auto that were utter crap.  They bead blasted a used
part, tested it and sold it as a "rebuilt" part.  When one of the ears
that the distributor cap attaches to broke off the side they welded it
back on at a funny angle that would never line up with any cap ever.  I
broke a new cap before I figured out what the problem was.

Of course the hall sender is available as a separate part and not even
that hard to change.  The trickiest part is to be sure you put the drive
gear back on the bottom in the same orientation that it came off but if
you mark things that shouldn't be a problem.

Glad your van is back on the road.

Ken Wilford
John 3:16
www.vanagain.com

Trooz wrote:
> It seems that the list members who quickly guessed my problem to be the Hall
> sender were correct.  After swapping out parts including an ECU, I finally
> got my mechanic to put in a new distributor and that seems to have solved
> the problem.  He basically refused to put in a rebuilt distributor, telling
> me horror story after horror story about rebuilt items.  He also insisted
> that you could not buy a Hall sender separately even after I printed out the
> page from one of our vendor's catalogs showing a new Hall sender in stock
> for my model.  All's well that ends well, I guess.  My van hasn't missed a
> beat for a couple of weeks now [he said, gently knocking on the table].
>
> Bob Trousdale
> '90 Westy
>
>