first of all, keep in mind that while i have a good brain for troubleshooting problems, i'm still very much a novice when it comes to fixing/maintaining cars.
had a problem in the beetle ('68, 1916cc pobjoy engine) tonight. was driving home from work and was going through a bit of a hilly, twisty section (henry lawson drive near picnic point), so the engine was probably labouring a bit more than usual, when all of a sudden, in 4th gear, i start losing power. putting my foot on the accelerator results in a little bit of go, then nothing, so i switch back the third gear and accelerate, and the same thing happens, accelerates a little bit then dies off, then i let the car slow a bit (probably doing about 20-25mph at this point) and put it back into second and the engine stalled.
so i push the car into the only lit section of road (this was at around 1:30am) within a mile or so and call my mate garth who says he's on his way.
in the meantime, turning the key, the battery seems to have plenty of power, as it's definitely trying to start, and the engine would kick a little bit but not actually fire up. about 15 minutes later garth turns up and we check the fuel filter, which had fuel in it (i've had problems with the fuel line/gas tank in the car before, so this was the first thing i checked), checked the spark plug leads, etc, which were all fine.
while we were pretty sure it wasn't the battery, we thought we'd try to jump start it off of garth's car, which we attempted with the same result.
while thinking about it, garth suggested i try turning the engine over again and it started this time, so probably about 20-25 minutes after it died at first, then i drove home (about 5 minutes away) and he followed to make sure i got there, which i did.
now, my question is, it seems to me that this is likely to be an overheating problem, (i don't, as yet, have any temperature gauges in the car, but this will be rectified soon) would this sound correct?
cray Wolfsburg Wizard
462 posts · joined Aug 2002 ·
