Ordinarily I take excellent care of my cars, but recently work issues have intruded and I have kind of let things go. My '92 240 has reacted with a petulant manner and several confusing problems.

One problem involves the alternator (that’s on another thread—sort of like they say on ebay, “please check out all my desperate pleas for help!”) but the problem here involves an intermittent hot start problem.

A couple weeks ago, the car began refusing to start after being driven around town. It cranked fine, but would not catch. After varying periods of time—45 minutes to 2 hours—it would start right up and run fine. It would always start fine when cold, also.

The onboard diagnostic system has not shown any fault codes.

I have changed out the fuel injection relay (passenger footwell), the crank position sensor, and the power stage. None of these steps solved the problem.

Finally, after a couple of weeks of getting randomly stranded (I started taking work projects with me, so I could make good use of my time ‘till the car would start) it refused to restart at all. I tried it several times over a two day period. NADA.

Thinking I might have a fuel issue, I sprayed some starting fluid into the intake, and it caught for a few seconds. Then nothing. This led me to suspect the fuel pump (that and the intermittent no-start—I’ve had fuel pumps act that way when they’re going out).

Yesterday I changed the main fuel pump, using an old used Bosch pump I had. After much cranking, it started. AHA! However when I shut it off, a few minutes later, it wouldn’t start. I just kept cranking, 20 seconds or so, and finally, it started and ran normally. Then it restarted a few times after that.

I’m not sure what to try next. Could a bad in tank pump cause this problem? I would check the 25 amp FI relay, but I can’t find it. I know where it’s supposed to be, but the only thing there are those two silver capped relays and the little junction box with the wires and fusible links coming up into it.

Misc Info: Car sometimes has trouble establishing a steady idle, splutters and dies, idles too slow, but this does not seem correlated with the non-starting.

Was in a wreck 2 years ago. Sideswiped pretty hard.

One other thing. This problem didn’t start until I had been using a trickle charger to charge the battery on the car. Could I have fried something with this?

If you would like to help prevent irreconcilable differences between a man and his Brick, please consider posting advice on where I should go from here.

Dschwied