Winter PSA for those in the salt states - check your terminals!

"themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles" (themanwithsauce) 12/10/2013 at 11:03 • Filed to: None

1

4

Came out to the murderous crapcan this morning to start it up and get the windows defrosted. It idled a little funny, but it's also ice cold and usually needs 30 seconds or so before it settles into the classic 2.0L ABA groove of "Eh, close enough to 900 rpm" . Go back inside, grab my breakfast, and start off. At the first light, I could tell it was a rougher idle than usual. Got worse the whole drive in. Thankfully I only have a 5 minute drive into work because it was wanting to stall when I got in the parking lot.

Did some quick research and saw a lot of people saying they replaced throttle bodies, MAF sensors, spark plugs, coils, wires and everything else under the sun. A lot of those parts are new or recently cleaned this past summer when I got the car. My guess was originally that my O2 sensor fell out of my damaged cat and was dragging on the ground......and I did NOT want to check that after last time. Finally someone suggested cleaning the battery terminals since that actually worked for them. I then remembered that I removed my negative terminal on sunday while playing around on the interior. So I sandpapered off the corrosion and salt on the terminal and post and put it all back together again. Guess what? Works great! Didn't cost me a dime and it's easy for anyone to do so long as you can remove the battery terminal.

Seat Safety Switch > themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles 12/10/2013 at 11:14

1

Get one of these to clean your battery terminals. I'll never go without one again.

DocWalt > themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles 12/10/2013 at 12:21

0

That's not an ABA, nor is it a Mk3 engine bay ;)

themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles > DocWalt 12/10/2013 at 12:24

0

.....totally not a mk2.

And good call, all the mk3 pics I was trying to post were getting kinja'd

DocWalt > themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles 12/10/2013 at 12:28

0

Also, that's a '90-'92 16V GTI with a short shifter. I think it's from the early end of that year range, based on the green P/S reservoir cap. I spend way too much time with VWs, lol.