You may remember me from such posts as "Intermittent Spark in 1979 Rabbit", from earlier this week ... Well now my "working" Rabbit - an 83 GTI - is also out of commission. Interestingly, the problem appears to be the same. No spark, as measured by my timing gun on the high voltage wire from coil to the distributor cap. When the car was running a few days ago, I had the timing gun on the same spot and saw nice rapid flashing. Not any more... This car has had this problem for a while. At first I thought it was the ignition switch b/c I could occasionally restart it while jiggling the switch if it cut off while cruising down the road. But I replaced it and found that wasn't the problem. I also tried several ignition control units. No luck. For a while, the car could only be driven short distances before it would cut out. The only way to get it going was by RAPIDLY cutting the ignition switch on and off. I was best able to do this with a hotwire-like setup. Then, magically, when I drove it out to the parking lot to fix my other rabbit, it started working again. It probably gave me 50 trouble-free miles before suddenly dying in my driveway. The usual trouble-free distance had been about 1 mile, so naturally I thought I had accidentally fixed it perhaps by jostling a wire while messing around with the two rabbits (this may be what happened?). Now, even rapid on/offing of the ignition wires doesn't work and the car is sitting at the bottom of my driveway (steep hill). I had taken this to my mechanic a couple of months ago (has worked on these since the early '70s). He temporarily got it going for a while when he worked on the connections (3 wires, I believe) inside the distributor. I'm not exactly sure what he did. I went to check his work when it started to fail, but I couldn't figure out how to remove the part that covers these wires inside of the distributor. I got the little c-clip off (or whatever it's called), but the cover still wouldn't budge. Anyway, I suspect that the problem may be in there somewhere, but I'm not sure. Other possibly important factors: The coil was replaced recently. The starter currently in this 83 rabbit is from my '79 rabbit and has an extra terminal on the solenoid (I believe that's the correct terminology). But the terminal *looks* like it's attached to the other terminal -- i.e. it's like a Y-connector in the world of audio. The GTI only has one wire that attaches to the starter (besides the BIG one) as far as I can see... I measured voltages at the 1 and 15 terminals and got somewhere between
11-12 volts. The voltage at the high voltage terminal was maybe 1 volt less than that. The resistance between 1 and 15 was zero. The resitance between 1 and 4 (high voltage) was 7.6 ohms. Same measurement for 15 and 4. The resistance readings were the same whether the ignition switch was in the on or off position. I did not remove any of the wires from the coil during these tests, except for the high-tension wire. Well ... that's about it. I'm completely stranded. Fortunately I live 50 yards from a BBQ restaurant!!- posted
16 years ago