Power at the Pump and more...

I am waiting for a few parts to show up before I re-assemble the fuel tank. While I was doing the final clean out of the fuel tank the breather wire broke off on me and I did not want to assemble anything until that shows up. So today I continued my work on the electrical system of the car. It doesn't require any parts except what can be found at the local harware store: some size 14 wire, solder, and some heat shrink tubing.

I started by putting the main harness back together. In my previous post I mentioned that I had found the reason that my fuel pump was not getting power, and it was because an animal had chewed through the white/purple wire that provides the hot (+) feed to the fuel pump. Ofcourse to to fix the main harness required pulling out the drivers side seat so that I had enough room to work. It needed to come out anyway, due to the fact that it needs to be recovered. In the picture on the left you can see the reconnected white/purple wire pulled out on the right of the other wires. I like to use the heat shrink tubing because it adds a lot more strength to the splice, should someone else need to yank the main harness back throught he firewall in the future, this wire will easily hold.

After I completed the splice, I re-wrapped the harness in black electrical tape, so unless someone really looked closely it would be very difficult to see where this repair occured. I also re-wrapped the other spots on the harness where I had unwrapped the main wiring harness to test where I did, and did not have power. After pulling the main harness pack forward into the winshield wiper resevoir box I reconnected the main harness to the front harness and a quick test with my digital multimeter at the fuel pump plug showed 12 volts! It was a lot of work to resolve a small issue, but I want to do this right so fixing this wiring was critical so I could return the fuel pump wiring to stock.

When I went to re-assemble the windshield washer resevior I also noticed that the resevior tank was cracked! Then I figured while I was at it I should make sure my windshild washer pump worked, so I hot wired the waher pump to the battery, and found out that was not working either! Two new things to add to my parts order. These are the sorts of little gotchas that drive up the cost of restoring one of these cars. Every time I dig into something new I find something that needs replacing or is not right.

I also started to repair the rear harness for the tail lights and side marker lights because they were also chewed up. I re-connected the drivers side marker light and was disgusted to see that is was not working after my repair. A quick inspection of the fuse box and I realized that fuse #8 was blown, and I don't have any extra 10 amp fuses to replace it with, so I will have to run to the harware store tomorrow and pick up some more fuses. So instead, I began to investigate why the fuse might have blown in the first place, and found even more wiring that is hidden underneath the area between the tail lights that is badly chewed up and will need repar as well. I am going to get a lot of practice soldering!

At that, I called it a night. I will work on splicing the tail light harness back together tomorrow, and hope to finish that up.