Ken G's Journal

Oh the ups and downs of working on this car.
So I changed out the alternator on Wednesday and as soon as I started up the car I had a major failure of the water pump jetting coolant everywhere in the engine compartment. Huge mess and annoyance.

I had a water pump on the shelf which only took me an hour to track down. For some reason I didn't label that box. Friday night I removed the alternator, coolant, radiator and old water pump. The bolts came out easily enough and I was able to clean it up.

This morning I installed the new water pump and all the other bits. When it was all back together it started right up and I thought i was off to the races, and well then it started to stumble. I tried to give it gas and it just would die, but if I left it back to idle it would sort of run.
I thought I heard air leak so I searched around for that that and tighten a few things that I hadn't worried about before. Still no luck, It would start, barely run and then die after a couple of minutes..

I remembered that when I started it the first time I didn't heard the fuel pump prime, so on a whim I disconnected the positive to the fuel tank and turned the car over a could of times, and then reconnected the fuel pump.
Turning the key the pump started to prime and when I started the car all the issues were resolved, lots of power, no pause. So weird, something must have off with the pump and the car was only getting the fuel that was flowing via gravity.

SO ok the alternator is working, I don't see any leaks on the water pump and the car is running like it was before. I still need to fix the fuel and temp gauges so tomorrow I'm going to swap out the voltage stabilizer again and see if that sorts that out.