Club 80-90 Forums

Hi all, newbie here from Wokingham, Berkshire. I have just bought a 1988 2.1 fuel injected Auto Caravelle GL and at the moment loving her despite that she seems to have developed “start stop” technology!!

I have only had her less than week and the PO I bought her from said she had sat in a lock up for 3 years and had hardly been used. I am currently using her every day to and from work and she drives nicely and pulls well.
But she randomly cut outs on me when braking and coming to a stop at traffic lights / roundabouts. It seems this only happens when she is warm and has been running for 10 minutes or so and she fires up straight away immediately after restarting.

She idles smoothly at about 1000rpm but every now and again you can see the revs drop suddenly and pick back up on idle or occasionally stalling.

I have cleaned and sprayed WD40 into has many electrical sockets in the engine bay I can find and changed the distributor cap and rotor arm, which I thought would have cured it as the old ones were pretty dirty inside with blacked carbon deposits on the contacts.

I have read on here bypassing the idle stabilisation unit (white box of tricks next to the coil I think?) can cure it but it will run rough. Is this right? and do these idle stabilisation units fail?

Also I was thinking of replacing the coil and the battery, my battery seems to be very small almost like a motorbike battery! and was wondering if it has sat for three years it might be shot and not giving enough power to the ignition system.

Any thoughts please or past experience of same symptoms to point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance.

Richard.

Juat a thought I had a similar ish problem , cutting out when braking !! , it turned out to be the vacuum hoses from the carbs to the servo .

on an air cooled there is a tee piece of unequall bore size made of rubber , it was this that had perished .

replaced this and not a problem since .

Asuming it is a DJ engine
Is the Idle stabilizer (16) still connected?

bigherb wrote:Asuming it is a DJ engine
Is the Idle stabilizer (16) still connected?

Hi yes I think it is a DJ engine (have looked for engine number but can’t find it)

Yes the idle stabiliser is connected and not the two leads connected together.

I have just taken off the idle control relay module that sits behind the rear light. It was just lying on the bodywork (I thought it was supposed to be fixed to something) and the connector plug was badly corroded and there were signs of dampness in the connector. So I have cleaned all the contacts with a wire brush and put it back together.

I am at work so won’t be able to test if this has done the trick until I drive home tonight.