shooftie

First off, I’d like to thank the vanagon mailing list members for their outstanding support and help. They were right there beside me all the way.

List info here http://gerry.vanagon.com/

Last Saturday as I was turning into the alley way that leads to my work ( doing plague induced alternate hours working) my van just died. No stumble, nothing.

Cranks fine, no start. I pushed van rest of way into work parking lot.

Then I started the diagnosis. Long story short, I found…

Fuel pump works key on

Ecu gets power key on

Coil gets power key on

Harness continuity to hall sensor and ground and power checks out fine

You get the idea, it all checked out. All the tests we would think of doing, including the Bentley manual ecu harness checks. Had work to do so that’s that for Saturday.

Sunday going over the same. Hall sensor failure was brought up. Well it was a candidate from the get go but I was putting that off. But I had to check if I was getting spark. Listmember suggested loosening distributor enough to raise it is shaft would turn and trigger hall sensor, watch for spark on grounded sparkplug. For some reason I was hesitant to do that but I was doing this alone and really needed to check spark. And I had no remote starter switch. I ended up with spark plug on case and video it when cranking. Yup,no spark.

Monday afternoon, evening. Back at it. Yes, the van still at work and I’m doing my evening shift. List member Geoffrey suggested brilliant idea of using timing light to determine if spark. I could cable tie trigger on and see the gun from drivers seat. No light flashing, No spark.

Swapped in a spare distributor. I had no idea if Hall sensor on it was good. But yet again no spark.

Tuesday, I took ecu out of its box, again. I had done that on the weekend to look for, oh, I don’t know what.

This time i found something. A bad solder joint on a power transistor middle leg. Bad enough that the leg would move in the joint. That must be it, I hoped. Mark and David on the list gave me hope that indeed it was the issue.

I reflowed the solder around that joint. Back up to work that late afternoon. Ecu in, and van starts. Not great, but starts.

I swapped the original distributor back in, and the van, after a bit of cranking, started. subsequent starting extremely snappy, much much better than before this event.

Poor pic of the bad joint, circled.

And in the other side of the board, the power transistor screwed to heat sink.