As the title says my 85 Cabriolet 1.6 with 2E2 won't hold an idle. The car starts and drives fine, but as soon as i let my foot off the gas and push in the clutch it stalls within seconds. which makes it kind of hard to dive Now a quick history on the car. I used to own this car 2 years ago and it worked fine. I sold it to a friend who drove it 100km had it painted then put it in storage for two years. I recently took it back off his hands. Now the car drove ok after coming out of storage for two days then stopped running. A quick check of the vacuum lines and they turned to dust as i tried to pull one off. Not so good!!! I then replaced all the vacuum hoses, spark plugs, distributor cap, rotor arm and HT leads. After this the car worked great for a few days. Then yesterday on the way to work it started to stall when i came to a stop. When i got to work i revved the engine up a few time and it seemed to be idling fine again. When i left work the car would stall every time i took my foot off the gas pedal. Now i've taken the carb back off and rechecked the vacuum lines to make sure nothing came lose, they where fine. The 3/4 point unit is extended about 14mm and retracts when the engine is started but it retracts to about 4~5mm showing. Not sure if that's a problem. I do hear the clicks when i turn the ignition on. The temp sending unit for the autochoke seems to be dead as the autochoke doesn't get 12v, but when i give it 12v the car still won't idle. I tried to remove the waxstat but i couldn't get the screws lose and didn't want to break them. but i never remember having a high idle problem when it was working it would idle around 1300~1400 until it was warm when it would idle around 900. Now before it started to outright stall, the idle would drop down to around 400~500 but it wouldn't stall. Sorry for making this so long but i'm starting to get really frustrated with this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
You say the 3/4 point plunger is only sticking out 4-5 mm when the engine is running; does that include the bigger diameter 'tip' bit? If so that's not right. Someone may have adjusted that to compensate for another problem (leaky vac hose possibly?). There's a 13mm 'nut' right at the back of the 3/4 point unit that you could wind in to adjust this. (8.5mm is nominally correct I believe) The fact that it's OK sometimes and then not at other times makes me think you perhaps have some debris in the float chamber that is sometimes getting sucked up into the idle jet, blocking it. You can get to the idle jet from the top by removing the little turret/tube next to the primary barrel, then unscrewing it from underneath where that was. There's an o-ring between the base of the turret and the top of the carb that may be in a poor state though, so be prepared to find a replacement if you do attempt this.
Thanks EZ_Pete you where right on both accounts. The idle jet needed to be cleaned and the 3/4PU needed to be adjusted after fixing the vacuum lines. Now it's idles just fine, maybe a touch high. but at least it runs so i can work from here. Thanks for saving me 300
Useful thread, I am picking up a passat next week that is refusing to idle so this thread will be my starting point cheers fellas
