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.suffolkpete wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2023 11:51 amFor 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.
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...
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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.