Hi, everyone. I'm new here, but hopeing that someone may be able to help me out with a wiring diagram or common knowledge. I have a 92 TSi. I went to leave the morning and when I started down the road, I lost all electrical power. It came back on after about a quarter of a second and stayed on for about 2 more seconds. This continued as I coasted down until the engine died. I started it back up and it was fine until I started to go again, and then it did it again. I know I lost all power, because the radio lost it's memory, and when I opened the door to get out, the seatbelt didn't move. I checked all the grounds that I could this morning, but I still had to make it to work. I let the car sit for half an hour and then I drove it to work with no problems. With the engine running I pushed and pulled on all of the major wiring I could quickly find under the hood. Is there a common connection point that I can look for problems? Does anyone have a wiring diagram for this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Andrew

Good luck chasing it down. Could be simple, could be dangerous. Back in the day I had the main ground strap for the engine rust through. Very exciting watching the insulation on the thottle cables burning while doing 70 mph in a dead car. Not a DSM, '63 MGB.
E.

Ya, that would really suck if it was dangerous. Although with what it did this morning, I could easily get hit trying to pull out on Maplecrest. I have to take some parts back to O'Reily's, so I'll probably just see if they have a book while I'm there.

Take your ECU and check the capacitors. Sounds like ECU damage, but it could be anything. Does it do it while you accelerate, decelerate, brake, take corners?

With it being to the entire car, I'd check and double check all alternator and batter connections. ECU would make sense if only the engine and gauges were dying.

I would definately check the battery connections and cables. They are bad for corroding and causing bad connections and high resistances. The alternator could also be an issue also.

I'm going to start with the alt wiring as I'm going to be in that area doing motor mounts. Plus, if the battery connection is lost, wouldn't it still run off the alt power. What about the alt itself shorting out?

From when i had bad battery wires, i know that my car did run, but my radio cut out and it often almost died at idle. My idle is pretty low now that it's fixed, but it would shake really bad and it died once when my positive terminal was broken. It also started really weakly, which i found out later was because about half of the ground wire was broken off. Good luck with that though, but yeah i'd just check every wire terminal, and also check all of your fuses to make sure they're tight. I had a few intermittant starting issues because of a couple loose screw in fuses.

If you can't find a repair manual locally, the PDF Mitsu book is online. I usually print out whatever pages I need. Almost bought a scanned copy on CD until I found it was free. Should be a 2 minute search. Too lazy to find the link, Corey prolly has it memorized.
E.

I poked at most of the fuses, but was more concerned about any major wiring going into the boxes since I lost everything. The car always started up fine when it was acting up. The best way to describe it would be if the entire car has one main relay, and that relay started turning on and off at random. It just seems that with problem it would be fairly obvious what the cause was.

Thanks for the info on the manual. I will look and see what I can find. I don't really want to buy the book, cuz I don't really need it for anything other than electrical or trans specs.

This is true if negative is taken off. If you take off the Positive while a car is running, it will die because these alternators need power input to create current output.

It did it again on the way home. I was able to hit some bumps while coasting and the power would cut out on the bumps. I replaced some questionable fuses in the main box off of the battery. There were two that the tops were off and the wire didn't look so good, so I put new ones in there. I guess I will see what happens tomorrow. I really think when I find it I'm gonna go "holy crap, yep that's the problem," but maybe that is just wishful thinking.

Are you talking about the wire from the positive cable end to the mini fuse box at the battery?

Sorry, I was talking about the fuse box that is bolted directly to the positive battery terminal. Two fuses had the plastic caps missing and the fuse wire was exposed and didn't look like it was in very good shape. I cleaned the connection to the battery too.

Had any problems since?