On day 6 of the road trip, the fuel pump decided not to play ball in the hotel car park, this was better that out on a moorland road, but still not a good thing. I fiddled with fuses & all those things you do when you're not sure where to begin & suddenly it was working again - excellent. I quarantined the old fuses & the rest of the trip was great.
A week or so later I went to Screwfix - 50 yards before I arrived the engine died - no fuel pump. I pushed it into the Screwfix car park & gave the fuse a hard stare. It appeared to be fine, but the plastic around the "fuse wire" bit looked a little bulged, had it been getting warm? I swapped the 10a for a 15a & it fired straight up - excellent.
On testing, both the 10a fuses were fine, which was odd. Then yesterday I decided to go to my brother's. I got no more that 1/4 mile when the fuel pump stopped & no amount of wiggling the fuse was going to re-start it. Then the starter stopped working as well. I pushed it home.
Once in the garage I had the dash out of it & poked around a bit. There was a large orange wire coming from the fuse box, it came from the fuel pump relay, there was a large grey wire going to the fuse box, it went to the fuel pump fuse. You might think that they would just join together somewhere near the fuse box - or even be just one wire. No, this is a Kit Car & further more, a kit car that's has several
owners, many of whom have "improved" it, so between the orange & grey wires was this collection of random sized wires & connectors. I simplified it down to the minimum it needed
Then I looked in the boot where there is a "security switch" which turns off the fuel pump. As I reached round the back I thought one of the terminals moved & on further investigation, the spade terminals were insulated with clear sleeves, BUT, the sleeves were over long & the terminals weren't gripping like they might, furthermore, one of the sleeves looked like this:-
That's been getting hot that has. So my assumption is that the spade terminals weren't gripping well, the over long sleeve sleeve, helped by some vibration - pushed against the switch body & slowly slid one or both of the terminals off until it was just touching & occasionally not touching at all. So I've fixed that.
On to the starter. The button is made to a pattern issued by the air ministry before WWII, so it's somewhere between 60 & 90 years old, but the type was used in Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Mosquitos etc as engine starter buttons. I had one in the Fury & I have one in the Stylus. The one in the Fury got a bit petulant & I gave it a squirt of WD40 & made it's life easier by making it fire a relay to fire the starter solenoid rather than firing the solenoid itself. That seemed to work. The one in the Stylus has only ever fired a relay & there seemed to be power in all the places that power should be, so I took the switch apart & cleaned out the ancient grease from around the terminals & gave it a squirt of WD40 for good measure & it seems to be working better. It's been around the local roads a few times - only as far as I was prepared to push it back from - & it's been fine, I shall do more testing tomorrow.
So, overall I'm quite please with the Stylus, it's been dropping hints that there was a problem for a while, but causing me the minimum of inconvenience.
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