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Sunday, 6 January 2019

It's Been A Funny Old Year.......

......... & it's only the 6th of Jan.

On the first I raced home from a friend's where I'd spent new year's eve, taxed the Fury & headed off to Brooklands for the new year's day meet. After about 2 miles the car stopped & refused to start. I took out the fuel cap & there was a rush of air - AHA! the tank vent valve isn't venting. I took the locking insert out of the filler & after a while it fired & off I went again.

Brooklands was mobbed with a two mile tailback waiting to get in - a wonderfully interesting tailback I'll grant you, but I decided to turn & try to find a way round it, then the engine stopped & refused to re-start. I wobbled the wire on the fuel pump & it came away in my hand. Thinking I now had two faults I called the RAC & got a tow home.

I cleared the vent valve & moved it to a place that was easier to get to in future & found the connector that had separated & replaced it with a soldered joint. I also took out the wire providing power to the rear USB sockets & replaced all that with a wire from the transmission tunnel.

Job done? Well you'd think so wouldn't you, two faults cured.

After a day or so I went to fill it with fuel ready for a Sunday run with the SKCC. I wouldn't start.

The engine was getting fuel as I took out No.1 sparkplug & it was wet, so electric then, I took the connector off the coil pack, no sign of 12v, I turned the ignition off & on again & the circuit tester lit up, there was a click & it went off.

After a lot of searching & testing I eventually found that the ECU allows the fuel pump to run for 2 sec to prime the system, then shuts it down to save power for cranking, then on again when the engine is running. It does this by switching the earth to the fuel pump relay. My car doesn't have a fuel pump relay & for some reason I'd wired the live feed to the coil pack this way instead. With the fuel having been in the tank all winter it had "gone off" & it was taking longer that two seconds to start, so the coil pack shut down. On the odd occasion when it did fire, the ECU turned the coil pack back on again & it ran just fine.

Bizarre - but it's been like that for SIX years

While it was in bits for me to do all this I also added a new indicator buzzer & a new connector just for the centre portion of the dash & taken out an unused relay, so I've got a few improvements from the fault finding.

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