Very Crappy Day, 914 Broke Down Options

[Britain Smith]

Well, I had a shitty day and to add to it my car decided that it was a good day to have issues. I was driving to the doctors office for my bum wrist and on a high speed onramp the car started to go slower and die. I coasted up the onramp and stopped right in the path of cars going 60mph. I was able to turn over the motor with it in gear to move it forward and then pushed it back out of the way. A tow truck guy who said he was a 914 guy, ended up pushing me off the highway using his rubber push bumper (I was a bit nervous).

I spent the better half of a hour on the phone with Brad try to determine what the hell happened. The car would turn over and it smelled like gas. It started up a couple of time for a few seconds and died immediately. To make matters worse, I had no tools on me and was in nice clothes. After going through every connection, switching the injectors around, looking for broken wires, checking EVERYTHING, I began to start switching out the relays in the engine bay. When I switched out the second one, the car fired up and ran like nothing happened.

So, my first question...what does the middle relay do on an early car? Also, what is the failure mechanism for relays? Do they die immediately or are they intermitant? Is there anything else I should check? The funny thing is, I just picked up the 1.7 injectors that lmcchesney sent me...thanks man! Unfortunately, I had no tools...that won't happen again.

-Britain

[mightyohm]

The middle relay is the fuel pump relay. I've never had a relay die, but I have had problems with broken wires in the harness that connects to the relay board. The relay board also has a tendency to get flakey because the rivets inside will oxidize and cause bad connections. The solution is to rebuild the board by stripping off the tar on the backside and soldering all the connections.