Guess the problem --, sudden loss of power (fixed it already) Options

[Dave_Darling]

Here's an amusing one for you.

Grinding up a long hill on Saturday, in ~100F weather, after about 8 hours driving in that same hot weather. Sudden loss of power, absolutely no go. The car starts decelerating. Tach starts dropping slowly; when I push the clutch in it drops straight to zero and comes back up when I let the clutch out. Pump the throttle, nothing happens.

This is, of course, absolutely in the middle of nowhere.

What do you think the problem is? How do we fix it?




. . . . . . .




What I did was pull over and stop the car on the side of the road. The wife called because she had lost sight of me. (Yay for cell phone reception!) She had pulled off at an exit and would wait for me. I tried cranking the starter a few times, but the engine wouldn't catch.

I popped the engine bay to see if anything obvious was wrong. Nothing was unplugged, but then I looked at my fuel pressure gauge. I have a nice little liquid-filled one mounted full-time in the engine bay, actually. It read zero PSI.

It had to be vapor lock--hot environment, long duration running, heavy loads, lots of heat. It pretty much matched the circumstances of when that would happen. Oh yeah, and my pump is in the stock 74 location.

I remembered stories from the old Porschephiles days of people pouring cold drinks on their fuel pump to cure vapor lock problems. Of course, you can't really get at the pump well in the stock location. But I took one of my (many!!!) bottles of water and poured it around up at the right-front corner of the engine bay. I think I actually heard something sizzle for a moment!!

Then I went back to the relay board. My fuel pump relay actually has a loose cover, so I popped that off of it and pressed down on the arm of the switch inside for about 10 seconds. Nothing at first, but the next time I pressed I heard something. Then I pressed again and definitely heard the pump run, and as I held the switch down I heard the pressure regulator make its squeaky noises. And the gauge showed 20 PSI, which is typically what it shows when I just force the pump to run.

Got back in, started the car, called the wife to tell her I was on my way, and drove off. The problem did not repeat.

Total time to fix: About 5 minutes.
Total cost to fix: About half a little bottle of water.

Whaddaya know--vapor lock isn't just a myth! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

--DD