[T3] Re/ Mystery Fix...

Daniel Nohejl danielnohejl at gmail.com
Sun Jan 27 18:40:42 PST 2013


Hmmm….when we first started having the fuel pump/ECU issue there was a plastic plug with a grey wire and a blue wire with white stripes plugged into the relay. While trying to fix our issue, I pulled an accidental gorilla move and yanked one of the wires out of the plug. It neither solved nor exacerbated the problem though.

Is there a way of fixing the plug/wire? It looks like it takes a standard size female connector. Of course once that's fixed, there are two more issues: repairing wire #19 which in our car is now taped off and disconnected from the FI harness and testing out another ECU…..though I do have an A unit I haven't tried yet. 

DN.

On Jan 27, 2013, at 8:54 PM, Jim Adney wrote:

> On 27 Jan 2013 at 18:49, Daniel Nohejl wrote:
> 
>> Jim, 
>> 
>> What do you mean when you say: 
>> 
>>> No, grounding #19 still uses the relay, but it bypasses the safety 
>>> cutout in the brain. It's useful for testing, but dangerous to run 
>>> this way for long.
>> 
>> In what way is it dangerous? I'm curious because over the summer, my
>> wife and I wound up having to jump the relay under the dash to ground
>> to get the fuel pump to work on our '69 Squareback. 
> 
> If you're actually jumping one terminal to ground, that would mean 
> that you no longer have the white plastic plug that surrounds the 2 
> coil terminals on the relay.
> 
>> Funny thing was, when we got the car, it had a "D" ECU with all "B" FI
>> parts and the pump did it's 2-3 second prime thing. Once we changed
>> the ECU over to a "B", the pump wouldn't prime. We tried three
>> different "B" ECU's and no change. Meaning either we had three ECU's
>> which happened to "break" in the exact same way or wire #19 went bad
>> somewhere. We tested it for continuity from the engine to the dash and
>> the wire checked out fine. Strange. 
> 
> It certainly sounds strange, but all the brains work in exactly the 
> same way, so you either had 3 bad brains, or there was some problem 
> with the wiring between the brains and the relay. The latter is quite 
> possible.
> 
> The delay is ~1 second and it's only there to allow the pump to work 
> long enough to get the engine started. Once the engine is turning 
> over, the brain keeps the pump running.
> 
>> I guess all of this is a long way of asking if we should be looking to
>> remedy this jump to ground situation in the near future because it
>> presents a danger of some sort? 
> 
> Part of the brain's function is to shut off the pump if the engine 
> stops for any reason. Imagine that you're in an accident that severs 
> a gas line. The engine stops for lack of gas, but your bypassed relay 
> continues to pump gas out onto the accident scene. Even though you 
> survived the crash, you might still die in the fire. It's not a 
> pretty thought.
> 
> It's a feature well worth preserving.
> 
> I had one friend who died in a car fire. It wasn't a VW and I don't 
> think it was this sort of problem, but I don't want that to ever 
> happen to any of you.
> 
> -- 
> *******************************
> Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
> Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> *******************************
> 
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