warren@ihlpl.UUCP (w. montgomery) (08/12/85)
My 1979 VW rabbit (gas fuel injected) has developed an engine problem that I haven't been able to trace and I wondered if anyone out there had seen something like this and could give me a clue before I break down and take it to the high priests of dials and guages (who have never been all that good with these sorts of things). The trouble is that when the car is warm, it idles roughly. It seems to have a rythmic miss, as if one cylinder were missing, but I can't see any difference among the cylinders (pulling the plug wires one at a time has the same effect no matter which wire I pull). The car idles fine when started cold, but starts to stumble within a minute of starting. The plugs, points, and timing are all good, and the compression is fine (no measurable difference among cylinders, and well within specs). I can find no evidence of vacuum leaks, and all of the pollution control gizmos that I can test without special tools seem to be doing their jobs. Other symptoms that may or may not be related include the fact that the mileage improved by about 10% for no good reason about the time that this started. It also makes a rattling noise in the tail pipe under low throttle (decellerating or sometimes just coasting) at about 2500 RPM. If you have any thoughts, let me know. Thanks for any suggestions.
kitten@hao.UUCP (08/15/85)
> It also makes a rattling noise in the tail pipe under low throttle > (decellerating or sometimes just coasting) at about 2500 RPM. > > If you have any thoughts, let me know. Thanks for any suggestions. *** Can't help you with the rest of the stuff, but the above sounds like the infamous VW cat-converter rattle. I can always tell when a VW is coming by just by the exhaust noise. 'Fraid you're stuck with that. {ucbvax!hplabs | allegra!nbires | decvax!noao | harpo!seismo | ihnp4!noao} !hao!kitten CSNET: kitten@NCAR ARPA: kitten%ncar@CSNET-RELAY