The first thing to do is dump the ECU fault codes. Depending on your
car's date of manufacture, there are two ways to do this. One requires
making a simple harness with a momentary switch, LED (and resistor to
drop the +12 to +5 vdc, unless you get a +12 LED from someplace like
Radio Shack), and some connector pins (either real ones from VW or made
from regular male spade connectors), the other, just the switch and
connector pins (this method uses the "Check Engine" light instead of
the LED). The Bentley shows how to make/connect the harness, as well
as how to read the codes.
If your car is running as bad as you say, there just about has to be
some fault codes stored. These codes can be VERY useful in determining
where the problem lies. See Section 5, pages 12 and 13 in the Bentley.
On Tuesday, Apr 1, 2003, at 14:48 US/Pacific, Barney Culver wrote:
My '91 GTI 16v is having some issues. After it warms up and runs fine
for a
while it all of a sudden runs very rough and has no power at all and
sometimes
stalls. After an inconsistant amount of time it all of a sudden has
power again
(almost as if it has an electrical short somewhere). Also when this
happens, I
noticed that the fuel pumps (both still running) make a higher sound
as if a
load were taken off of them. So far I have replaced the hall sender
plug, the
potentiometer plug (sp?), and the mass air flow sensor plug (I think
that's the
one I replaced...it's directly accross the airbox from the
potentiometer plug),
and the problem is still there. This is the last hope before sending
it off to
the shop and letting them go fishing.
--Holland
[email protected]
