Brickboarders

Last week, my '82 244 (K-jet/Chrysler ignition) began to act up again. Stopped cold in traffic, then would run only a few seconds after restarting, then ran well enough to get home, then repeated all of the above.

I tried my spare fuel pump relay, and it didn't help.

The last time this kind of thing happened, it turned out to be an intermittent connector in the red-white wire from the ignition ICU to the coil and the fuel pump relay, which I fixed for good by cutting out the connector and splicing the wire.

I figured the new episode was caused by some other aspect of the ignition system, so I checked it out per Bentley. It passed all the tests, but the problem remained.

So maybe it's fuel, right? I jumpered the fuel relay plug and the pumps ran. I tried starting the car with the relay plug jumpered, and the engine ran pretty well. Drove the car around for a while, but I did't want to live with that arrangement.

Given that the pumps seemd OK and the ignition seemd OK, I began to think about the fuel pump relay again. Both I had tried were of the same vintage (1987 manufacture). I reinstalled one of them and kept a finger on it while attempting to start. It seemed to click appropriately, but the fuel pump didn't respond.

After letting all that percolate for awhile, I decided that I should do the obvious thing by checking the internal relay contacts. My multimeter revealed they were not the low-resistance routes they should be. I took off the relay cover, cleaned the contacts up (held a piece of paper between them and pulled it through several times), reinstalled the relay, and was rewarded with a normal start and an uninterrupted drive around the neighborhood.

I'm going to risk rush hour traffic tomorrow.

Time, too, to look into the contacts on that aged spare relay.
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jds