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WTF? boost does distributor damage...



Sorry for the rant, but I had to tell someone. How's this for "wierd"?

Katie and I were going to put some more break-in miles on the '77 by
taking a ~275mi trip to Ft Myers and back, caravaning with a friend who
happened to be headed that way in his MR2. We haven't even gotten five
miles from home, and I punched the throttle at 2500rpm in 4th gear. It
pulled quite hard to 4000rpm (superchargers are cool!). I shift into
5th, hit the gas, and NOTHING! Well, not "nothing", but more like I
would expect in any other 8v low-compression VW at 2500rpm. Barely any
increase in speed. What the heck?

Pull into gas station, pop the hood, and find the boost tube popped off
the intercooler. No big deal. Clamp it back down, start it up, and move
on. When I get on the road again, I went to about half-throttle, and the
engine stutters BAD. Huh?

My friend makes a wild guess and thinks maybe the plug wire came loose
from the distributor. It is near the boost tube that came off, and
didn't look like it was sitting quite straight. So I pull the plug wire
off, and with it comes a chunk of the distributor cap! The boost tube
blew off the intercooler with sufficient force to break the plug wire
off of the distributor!! I couldn't believe it.

We managed to limp it home with the wire kind of pushed into the cap. As
long as I didn't stress the engine at all, it ran smoothly on all four.

One less new Bosch dist cap in the world, I guess!

Neal