A month or so ago I went up to the Cleveland Ohio area to look at a 1997 Van den Plas that had been sitting for more than a year.
The previous owner had advertised it as a non-runner stating that it had a broken crank sensor bracket.
I found this hard to believe since I had never heard of this before.
Anyway I got to the seller's house and the car was sitting in his back yard with streaks of dirt all over it.
The interior was in decent shape and there was only a little bit of rust around the rear wheel arches.
Now there may be more underneath but at least it didn't look like the car had been hit anywhere.
It had some aftermarket non-original wheels on it.
After a short amount of negotiation I did end up buying the car for a very reasonable price.

Photo from Facebook Marketplace ad

Dirty car from rear 3/4 view

Interior shot (front seats)

Steering wheel and dash

Rear seats

Anyway I have been slowly working on getting the car back under way.
I pulled the coil packs and discovered that the spark plug galleys were full of oil.
I suctioned out the oil and pulled the plugs. I added some marvel mystery oil to each cylinder and let it set for a couple days.
I renewed the cam cover gasket and plug galley seals. After installing some new plugs I put the coil packs back on the top of the engine.
I then carefully cranked the engine over by hand with a large ratchet and 1-5/16 socket to make sure the engine was free before trying the starter.
It seemed fine so I then tried the starter and things sounded normal but when I checked for spark, there was none.
I then tried cranking it over again while watching the tach. No movement on the tach so then I moved on to looking at the crank sensor more closely.
Sure enough some previous "mechanic" had managed to break the end of the crank sensor bracket off.

Junk crank sensor bracket
Someone had the bright idea to try using JB Weld to glue the crank sensor into the broken bracket.

JB Weld repair to broken bracket
So fortunately I have a couple spare AJ16 engines so I robbed a bracket and sensor off of one of those.
I installed the bracket and then I got my VO meter to check the resistance across the two crank sensors to see if there was any difference.
That is when I discovered this issue with the crank sensor that was on this car.

Only one whole terminal inside the connector
So not only was the crank sensor bracket broken, the actual wiring plug on the crank sensor itself was F'ed up.
So I put the spare crank sensor on the car and connected everything back up.
I tried the key again and miracles of miracles, it started right UP!
Yahoo!
Then it immediately ran out of gas.
So next jobs are to see if the transmission works and look at the brakes to see what is needed there after sitting in a muddy yard for a year.

 

That being the original AJ16 CKPS design you have the chance of upgrading to the 5-degree advancing Andy bracket






The Trans and Engine ECU cross talk to each other as they dance together , may have the remove the on Trans body connector and clean the connector , the culprit is the in the Trans speed sensor wires caring the sensitive speed signal

To remove connector , pull straight aft 1 / 8 inch to unlock and only then rotate top of connector to cars left , note the use of the tie wraps in someone's pic , no car jacking required to do on car's left side

 

What's one more when you already have way too many? Congratulations on saving another.

Parallel stories: I broke the crank bracket on my old XJ6 (boneheaded move) and tried to JBweld which didn't work. Had to buy a used one. I bet the Andybracket is much stronger. Also, the wheels I put on my XJ6: