Zel's Fleet Blog...Rover, Renault, Peugeot, Trabant, Invacar & Sinclair C5

[Zelandeth]

For the blower fault look at the fuse box first. The connectors can get hot and "relax", especially if 30mm fuses have been used instead of the correct 32mm. Otherwise the whole heater has to come out, which is a bit of a faff.

I've already noticed some nonsense going on with the fuse box and had several issues with poor contacts there so that will definitely be checked first. Given how long the car has sat though it's very likely to have seized up, or at very least the brushes to be stuck in their holders.

Longer term I'll need to pull the heater box to replace all the foam seals on the air blend flaps anyway as I'm sure those have long since decomposed. Pretty sure I ingested a fairly significant portion of them during the first drive the first time I went above about 20mph...

-- -- --

You know I called that fuelling fault resolved? Yeah...about that.

First thing today I wound up swearing at the fuel pump again as I discovered that it had been leaking overnight from the base gasket.



Thankfully it stopped once I got in there (just) with a stubby wrench and got a little more tension on it. Without having to remove it from the car yet again. A job I am thoroughly fed up of doing!

Very useful tools shorter spanners.



Would definitely have had to remove the pump otherwise.

With my confidence boosted by yesterday's good running we went out to drop off a whole bunch of oil at the recycling centre.



Aside from the temperature getting higher on the gauge than I would have liked before the stat opened (the joy of aftermarket parts?), things were going well.

Right up until about 90 seconds after that photo was taken.





That "fixed" fuel pump has only gone and completely stopped pumping.

Previously when it was playing up I was still getting *some* fuel, so you could nurse it along even when it was acting up. Today, nope. Nothing. My guess is that I'm going to find that one of the valves has unseated itself when I pull it apart. That however is purely going to be to satisfy my curiosity, it clearly just doesn't want to live so that pump will shortly be getting chucked in the scrap metal bin. Not without a certain degree of vindictive pleasure I might say given how much time I've wasted on it.

Electric pump and blank off plate have been ordered, along with a few other bits and pieces from my longer shopping list.



Thankfully a friend lives very locally and was able to bail me out, so salvation arrived in a Nissan Pixo and gave me a run back home (seriously, I was like five minutes drive away) to grab a couple of things to hopefully get me going again. Especially as recovery was estimating about two hours of a wait. Made it clear to the operator that we would be trying to get the car going in the meantime, and would call them up to cancel recovery if we were successful. I also asked for them to get the recovery agent to give us a call for an update before actually dispatching.

After we pushed the car out of the bus stop and into an adjacent car park to hopefully avoid me getting a parking ticket. My friend is of course is sickeningly fit and didn't even look vaguely winded, it near killed me though! We did however definitely prove that the brakes aren't binding as she rolls astonishingly easily once moving. Brake servo still had vacuum available a good half hour after the engine stopped too, so that's not leaking down.

Grabbed all of the testing setup from a couple of days ago - which thankfully I hadn't reattached to TPA yet. One very quick and dirty get-me-home bodge was thrown together.



Power stolen from the starter solenoid supply (run pump to fill the carb bowls, disconnect, reconnect starter, start engine, disconnect starter, reconnect pump).



Ground sourced by loosening the coil mounting bracket bolt and squashing a wire under it.



The pump for all it looks precarious was actually pretty well wedged between the fuel lines themselves and the breather pipework so wasn't going anywhere - especially bearing in mind this was purely intended to last for the drive home which is all of five minutes. This is very much what you'd call a trail fix.

Horribly janky mess, especially using an unfused line from the starter solenoid, but it did get me home, the car not missing a beat the rest of the way.

Safely home.



The frustrating bit of failures like this is that this is how smoothly the car is running when actually getting fuel. Which I think is a good indication of the fact that I am actually making progress, even if it didn't necessarily feel like it this afternoon.

https://youtu.be/h8_TSE7lLaY

Shout out to Reeve's Recovery too. Contrary to the call handler's estimate, they called to say they were in the area and would be with me in less than 30 minutes - right about the point at which we got the car going. They were really polite though, even though they had basically just wasted their time because Autoaid hadn't passed on my message asking them to call us.

So, hopefully in a few days we will be back up and running - without that blasted fuel pump.

May use that opportunity to drop the radiator off to be recored, will see how time goes. Or I may tidy this setup a bit more. Main thing I need to do is to get an ignition switched wire into somewhere accessible in the engine bay. There is actually surprisingly little wiring in the P6 engine bay, and very few accessible connections. As I mentioned in a previous post I really need to get a non-ballasted supply to the coil as well, so I may well end up running two new (fused) feeds for this purpose from the fuse box.

An additional component I *will* be ordering will be an inertia switch to kill power to the pump in the event of an impact. Any vehicle using an electric fuel pump absolutely should have one fitted. It is a critical safety component - and like all of those systems they're things that you really hope never to test, but can prove very important if the worst happens.

[Zelandeth]

Perfect weather today for working on cars. Not.



However I had noticed a very pronounced smell of raw fuel when in the general vicinity of the P6, leading me to believe that the mechanical pump was leaking - again.

Given that we've already had several fireworks land on our roof and driveway from idiots launching them (often in the middle of the day, why?), this wasn't something I was willing to leave until the weather got better. Especially given that looking at the forecast that's not going to happen until sometime around June 2024.

The degree to which the pump had decided to leak became immediately apparent when I looked in the drip tray and discovered that it had dumped well over a gallon of fuel over the last day and a bit.



So in we went. Again.

This complete and utter pain in the tail has now permanently been relieved of duty.



Well, aside from plugging the hole in the block until the replacement pump and blanking plate are here anyway.

Temporary electric pump has now been secured reasonably solidly by attaching it to the washer bottle with several zip ties. I'm not proud of it, but it's only going to be in here for about a week or two and it's not going anywhere.



Also brought some sanity to the wiring - which literally was just stuff I had grabbed from the box of random bits of wiring to test the theory that I had issues with the mechanical pump a good few days back. I'll be completely redoing this for the new pump once it's installed (and I figure out where power will be sourced from), so I just chopped off the excess and routed things a bit more sensibly for now.



Oh, and added a fuse - which makes me somewhat less nervous.



Apologies for the duct tape. Didn't have any insulated connectors on hand and given it was absolutely tipping it down when I did this, getting out the heat gun and necessary extension lead to run it seemed a poor decision...so duct tape it is. Note again, this is a short term workaround, NOT a proper fix. It may end up getting attacked with heat shrink tubing anyway as it's making my teeth itch.

At least as things stand it's in a state where the car can safely be run like this until the new pump is fitted and even more importantly is no longer actively leaking fuel.

[Zelandeth]

Current fight? Car insurance yet again. After nearly a week I finally managed to wrestle a confirmation of my no claims discount out of Adrian Flux from the cancelled policy from the Caddy. I've never known a company fight me quite so much in letting me actually cancel a policy...none of your sales nonsense is going to change the fact that I've SOLD THE CAR the policy relates to! Also managed to cost me nearly £50 in fees somehow, based on prior experience with them can't say I'm surprised.

Now having five years (which should be 15 if it weren't due to a prior foul up on the part of Adrian Flux - and people wonder why I don't like them) NCB available, I'd like to apply this to the policy on the Peugeot, because you know...saving money. Not expecting it to be much, but as it's costing me north of £600 a year every little helps.

Now here I'm running into another headache. That isn't a change which you can make to the policy using any of the options to edit things through 1st Central's web portal. So I phoned them...apparently their online only policies are something handled completely separately so they can't make changes to it over the phone. I'll need to use the web chat thing to ask for assistance. Guess what's currently not working...Just going to go bash my head against a wall a few dozen times.

The operator on the phone said that one option would be to just cancel and recreate a policy with the new details...For which the quote she gave me was £130 more expensive than the existing one...with exactly the same details, just plus five years of NCB applied. Obviously plus the various fees which would be incurred.

I had to try really hard to continue being civil at that point.

Why seemingly with the singular exception of Hagerty are insurance companies so utterly impossible to deal with?

[Dick]

One of my pet hates are insurance companies.. any excuse not to pay.. the one I use though still has an office and someone who will actually help..
Have you considered building a car port to for a bit of protection when you're working?

[Zelandeth]

One of my pet hates are insurance companies.. any excuse not to pay.. the one I use though still has an office and someone who will actually help..
Have you considered building a car port to for a bit of protection when you're working?

Sadly not an option here due to planning rules. Otherwise it would already have been done, trust me. I'd love something to keep the worst of the weather off and to give a bit of shelter from the sun in the summer.

The inertia switch has now arrived, hopefully the rest of the things will be here tomorrow.

[Zelandeth]

Given the weather I've not been doing too much car related this last few days. Especially as family are off work this week so I've been trying to be social.

Wanted to tick something off today though as a few parts have recently turned up.

First up was this functionally unimportant but visually annoying issue in the cabin.





Much better.

Little details, but that was something which drew my eye every time I opened the door so I'm glad to have sorted.

The new fuel pump is now here. Not actually fitted yet, but have had a ponder where it's likely to go. This is currently looking to be favourite. It's an otherwise unused void, and is about as far away from the heat of the engine as I can get.



Should be pretty invisible once installed there as well rather than being up by the ignition coil where it would be rather in your face.

Final job for the day was investigating the lack of a working heater blower, or at least the most simple possible cause of said problem. Actually getting to the blower as far as I can tell basically means removing the heater box, which comes out from the outside. Fun. That WILL likely need to happen either way as the foam seals on the air distribution flaps will inevitably have decomposed to near nothing by now.

For a change I decided to actually follow the rules for and check for simple faults first. I've had a bunch of faults tracked so far to poor connections in the fuse box, so I really should look there first.

Oh look...



Sure enough, wiggling that fuse resulted in the blower motor springing back to life. Not making any horrible noises (yet) and it's working on both speeds. Seems to be moving an acceptable amount of air for a ventilation system from this era.

While they're *supposed* to be on separate fuses, this switch lighting up suggests that the rear window demister has also been tied into the same fuse.



That obviously won't have been helping the situation with regards to overheating contacts in the fuse box.

Given I've found several contacts in that fuse box to have issues I can see it being replaced going forward. Especially as I'd like to add a couple of additional separately fused feeds in the future. I'd also rather be using blade fuses simply because the old glass ones are difficult to get hold of in an emergency these days. I do always try to keep spares in the car, but Murphy's Law states that the one day you need one in the middle of a trip will be the one day you borrowed the spares for something else. I'd really rather be reliant on spares that I can pick up at any Halfords or even most motorway services in a pinch rather than something I need to order in specifically. The only factor I've found around here which still carries them on the shelf is a 40 mile round trip away.

Those Scotchlocks will obviously also be getting filed under B for "bin" once I've tracked down what they're feeding and come up with a more professional solution.

Speaking of things lighting up, this one randomly decided to start working today.



It's not worked on either of the door switches until today. I like self-healing faults!

Having a working heater blower though makes the car a lot more usable outside just the summer months as it means I've half a chance of actually keeping the windscreen demisted on a rainy day.

[Dick]

How badly bodged is the wiring loom?

[Zelandeth]

How badly bodged is the wiring loom?

So far I've not found much. Yet. I think most of that you can see just relates to the radio. Plus there's something funky with the headlights I've not had time to investigate yet. Though that could just be a dodgy switch too that's been bypassed. Currently there's no sidelight position - they just come straight on to dip beam as soon as the switch is turned on.

[suffolkpete]

Speaking of things lighting up, this one randomly decided to start working today.



It's not worked on either of the door switches until today. I like self-healing faults!

Having a working heater blower though makes the car a lot more usable outside just the summer months as it means I've half a chance of actually keeping the windscreen demisted on a rainy day.

There should be four door switches

[Dick]

How badly bodged is the wiring loom?

So far I've not found much. Yet. I think most of that you can see just relates to the radio. Plus there's something funky with the headlights I've not had time to investigate yet. Though that could just be a dodgy switch too that's been bypassed. Currently there's no sidelight position - they just come straight on to dip beam as soon as the switch is turned on.

I restored a 76 and 77 mgb.. on the first annoying electrical pixies living under the bonnet.. on the second I fitted a new loom.. life was so much nicer.. apart from the overdrive cable catching fire..