Re: Help - Air filter assembly caught on fire

[trnsfrma@ix.netcom.com (Shawn C. Meze)]

At 08:40 PM 4/26/97 -0500, you wrote:
>As I was driving today, my '88 16V started puttering and then stalled. 
>When I popped the hood, I could see smoke and smell plastic burning. 
>After getting it home and disassembling the air filter assembly, I found
>the air filter had pretty much burned up, the plastic housing is all
>melted inside and some of the hoses have also melted.  The engine still
>turns over and runs briefly before stalling out.


More importantly, did you find out -WHY- it caught on fire?? Sounds like the 
obvious thing is that the oil filter was soaked with oil, right? (Paper 
filter or K&N??) The question is, what caused it to ignite?? Something must 
of been really hot, to do that. I fear your problem is not the burnt 
filter/housing, but whatever it was that has failed and caused the fire. 


>other concern is how much damage I may have done to the engine since
>there was no air filter on my 20 minute drive home and there was
>difinately alot of debris still in the housing when I took it apart. 
>God knows what got sucked up into the engine.


Well, probably no dammage. Did you clean out he airbox of debris before you 
drove it? If you did, then a 20 min drive shouldnt hurt it any. (Unless your 
driving down a dusty siltbed road!) Slap in a new filter and see how it runs. 
You may have injested pieced of the burning airfilter. If so, theres nothing 
you can do about it now. 
HTH!


Shawn
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