Sensor near the 02 sensor/cat

[increasinglyhumbled]

recently my 88 B2 has been running awful...revs high and has almost no power output, can barely make it up my driveway. It sounds like a loud vacuum, so I figure it's related to the vacuum line. I was looking at the catalytic converter, found the 02 sensor (was pretty proud of myself for that) but right in that general area was an empty clip that looks like it should have something connected to it. Anybody know what that might be?

 

[increasinglyhumbled]

OK, so I found the connector that went into the clip...but I'm still curious what that is/does...

 

[adsm08]

Pictures.

 

[increasinglyhumbled]

4x4 light sensor?

 

[increasinglyhumbled]

well, as usual, this is turning into an adventure/learning experience. after farting around with the vacuum lines, I took it for a test drive, smelled burning brakes and noticed smoke. The e brake has been acting funny so I went to the driver rear brake assembly and noticed the e brake doesn't disengage properly...so I'm now having fun with springs and levers and diagrams...and just punctured my wheel cylinder.

I'm going to go through all of the brake assemblies and clean em up/sand any sticking points and grease them in hopes that my lagging speeds were caused by faulty brakes?

 

[adsm08]

One of those is for backup lights, I think the other one is the neutral sensor, it's used to detect shifter position and modifies the idle speed accordingly.

 

[increasinglyhumbled]

OK, I looked up that neutral position sensor...looks to be specific to automatics? This is a manual, so sounds like some conversions were done and that's why it was bypassed. When I plugged it in, my dashboard lights stopped working and so did my temperature gauge. Dash lights started working again after I unplugged it, but the temperature gauge did not. Summabetch.

Been fighting with the rear drum brakes all day. How important is it that the self adjuster mechanism works?

 

[increasinglyhumbled]

turns out the problem was a bad clutch. looking at DIY videos, that doesn't look like something I feel like tackling.