June 23, 2011 - So much for all the basking in glory.
I was driving home last night and the MG started to stumble for a bit, then coasted to a halt. It acted like it was out of fuel. This has happened before. Luckily, I was following my coworker Brandon home and I was only a couple of blocks from his house. So he grabbed a couple of items and we tried to fix it.
First, I checked that there was power to the fuel pump. Yup. We threw in some fuel, just in case. No change. The pump sounded a bit off, though. Strained. We sat there and kicked around a number of ideas such as clogged inlet screens, overheated fuel lines and the like. Finally, we decided to grab his trailer and just drag the car back to my place where I could troubleshoot in a more controlled environment. When we went to start the car to put it on the trailer, there was no fuel pump noise at all. A quick feel under the car and I found a power wire that was no longer attached! It had come off the ring connector. Aha!
I used a bit of electrical tape from underhood to tape the wire to the terminal, just enough to get the car running and on to the trailer. That got me home.
The connector is one that came with the pump. I didn't have any ring terminals in the mini size used, so I'd just reused the connector and spliced the wire into my harness. So this time, I cut off the spliced wire and crimped in one of my own, complete with heat-shrink. That should solve the problem. The car fired up happily so that must have been it. It's expected that a car that's had this much work performed would have some trouble.
tags: fuel, debugging |
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