VERY strange behavior: 82 vw pu; HELP! please read!

I have an 82 VW pickup with 1.7 CIS and AC, manual 5 speed. I fueled up today, putting 5 gallons of fuel in to top of the tank. I started it up to drive away, and it stalled. I tried again and held it to the floor. I revved up high then stalled down to near dead and revved again while it was floored. The tach is also completely dead now for the first time that I have owned this truck. It does this, revs, goes nearly dead and revs. I drive away like this with the thing to the floor. It surges at full throttle for a second and fully decelerates for a second or two (engine still partially revved) and then surges again for a second, all while being floored. I slowly work through the gears getting to about 40MPH in fifth. It seemed to go dead less at lower engine speeds. Tach is still dead the whole time. I limped back to my apartment 7 miles away doing this. It must have been hell on the entire drive train. It acted like the fuel pump was turning on and off, like running out of gas. But I had a new pump installed less than a year ago. I am going to straight wire the fuel pump relay tomarrow and pray to God that he may let the relay be the problem. A neighbor said that the coil is suspect from the dead tach. Please, please write any response. Any and every idea is gold to me. I will be watching this closely. Thanks.

Reply to
thateb
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It is hard to figure out what might had dine this suddenly like that. However one thing does come to mind.

Do you top off your tank? Could the tank venting be failing? Try removing the gas cap and see if it improves.

Also it is possible that the fuel you got was dirty and is not clogging the pick up sock in the tank or the in line fuel filter. I would think this is the most likely issue.

Water could also be part of the problem, but I would have thought it would have totally shut you down.

Reply to
Joseph Meehan

In the light of very strange behavior, I would try connecting a jumper (starting cable for example) from the negative terminal of the battery to something metal firmly mounted to the engine block. This might be a bracket holding the air conditioning compressor, or even a protrusion on the block or head. Keep the jumper clear of moving parts.

If the problems don't improve, at least it was simple to have tried.

Reply to
Tom's VR6

Found out what it was. The R/BK wire fell off the coil. Bentley seems to think it goes to the fuel pump relay.

Reply to
thateb

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