$23 new at WorldPac. Just sayin...

Greg knows...for a second there, I thought you were talking about the starter .

Hahah! That would be nice!

Well, add that to the list I guess.

Did it not test OK?

Well, another night of work last night with Craig's generous help. First I changed the negative battery cable, as it was a bit crusty, and then we swapped the battery. Car now turns over easily. But no fuel pumps, no injectors firing, and no spark.

Changed the fuse the main wire to the relay runs to, and the injectors now fire, but still no pumps, and no spark. Swapped ICU and ECU as well as main relay. Still nothing. Ran through a barrage of tests to figure out why there was no spark. Everything checked out except for the voltage test at the power stage. There is significantly less voltage than spec, and we can't figure out why. Pretty frustrating but hopefully we can figure this out.

Another night in the garage with Craig yielded mild progress, but still no startup. We managed to figure out the pump situation, and got the pumps working using the factory test of grounding pole 17 on the LH ECU. Both pumps fire. Unfortunately, when we plug in the LH ECU, the pumps will not fire. So something isn't grounding there somehow. We ran pretty much every factory ICU and ECU test and passed. Verified continuity and grounds for everything including the 4 pin connector, fuel pump relay etc. The only test that we didn't pass is voltage at power stage. We needed between 0 and 2 volts oscillating at power stage pin 5 and ground while cranking. We get 0.2 volts. But we do have 12 volts at power stage pin 4 and the coil. Coil has been checked. Resistance there is good.

Sigh. I feel like I'm getting the hang of this though. Spent a lot of yesterday reading wiring diagrams to figure this stuff out. Just frustrating to have seemingly everything still not working.

Will it run if you jumper the pumps? Connect fuse 5 to fuse 7 (or is that 4 and 6? 3 and 5??? Nothing's gonna zot if you get it wrong) and give it a crank.

Edit - wait, hold up. I don't know if you've changed the fuel pump relay wiring. If grounding the ECU fires the pumps, you must have. Your relay still requires a tach signal though, no? The above jumper test is how we got your car to fire before.

Yes, we did change the relay wiring, but the pumps would still fire right now if you jumped 5 and 7. I think. Problem is, we still don't have spark either. Coil is good, as is voltage at the coil. We don't have the correct oscillating voltage at the power stage while cranking. We were wondering if the hall sender at the distributor was bad?

The main relay handles all of the switched power to the EFI...all of it. It's a DPDT relay that separates the engine side into two components. One side handles sensor inputs (MAF, CTS etc) and the other side fires the active side of the EFI (pumps, injectors, IAC). The relay is triggered by the computer through grounding. So when wired, we ground the side of the relay that runs the pump, fires the injectors and idle etc and it fires. This is covered in the basic ECU power testing.

So we've verified that all aspects of the wiring is fine. There are two problems as I see it:

1. The side of the wiring that deals with the pumps, injectors etc is not getting a ground signal. So we can jump the harness and verify that the wiring is fine, but the computer is not helping.

2. The power stage signal test (as per Bentley) says that the signal coming from pin 16 on the computer. This signal should be coming from the distributor hall sensor and sending an 0 - 2 V pulse to the ignition amplifier (this then triggers the coil). The power test is to disconnect the amplifier and test for an oscillating pulse on pin 5. We receive a constant voltage of 0.2 V. We've verified the dizzy wiring and it's connected and should be fine. I don't have an oscilloscope, so can't test the pulse from the Hall sensor and don't know how to verify that it's fine. What we know is that it worked the last time we fired the car.

At this point, we've gone over it from head to toe and simply can't come up with why these two issues don't work.

Does anyone know how to check the Hall sender? That's about all we have right now.

I'd post this over on TBrix, but the signal to noise would be pretty high...Greg and I know how to read a wiring diagram.

Thanks Craig.

Well, another night in the garage…problem solved.

Went through the entire EZK greenbook problem solving flow chart. Everything pointed to a bad ground for the ICU. But we had continuity between the ICU and the chassis. Nothing made sense, but I kept wondering what was going on at the distributor, and decided just to check if we indeed had 12 volts there. When I checked I realized that something was wrong….we had 12 volts at the wrong pole. After verifying this several times on different factory wiring diagrams, I realized what was wrong. The wires in Dave's harness going to the distributor were switched. Power was going to ground and vice versa. If you reference the schematic in the manual he sent, you can see he has the red wire going to position one at the distributor and black at 3. In actuality, red should be at position 3 and black at 1. If you even look at the picture DIRECTLY next to the diagram, you can see the red wire going to position 3 on the left of the plug. Hahah! So we had traced 12 volts there only to find we were getting it at the wrong plug! Swapped the red and black wires in the plug, and we had spark. Turned the key and the car started. Problem solved. The pumps are now firing and all is well.

What a relief! So stoked right now! Man that was driving me batty! The rest of the weekend is gonna be muuuuuch better….

Woo effin' hoo! Good job, boys!

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR...Are you home today? I'm coming over...I'd brake into your garage if you weren't home just to hear it run after all that toil. Barton should be sending you a big F'ing cheque in my books. $100 rebate is just silly.

Haven't commented up to now as I had nothing to add on a technical front and didn't want to clutter. So, CONGRATS on figuring that out, must feel good to have it running!!

Thanks guys! Yes, it does feel very good to have it running now. Figured it out....car hasn't been driven since 2008...nearly 7 years. Yikes. So to have it going now, and have the prospect of driving it this summer, I'm pretty excited.

Yeah, $100 off the harness doesn't seem worth it at all. Considering the hassle and stress. Dave explained that on the 740 harness diagram he was looking at, the red and black are different from the 240, and he never consulted the 240 harness. Sigh.