|
As I type, I'm drinking some good champagne to celebrate the end of a six month nightmare. As many of you know, I have been chasing a vexing, multi-layered hesitation and power-loss under load problem. I didn't drone on about it here, because I wanted to do it myself. I needed to do it myself. I needed to learn. I needed to feel the pain and suffer the frustrating consequences of letting a teen-aged Jiffy-lube tech "change" my fuel filter. A filter he did not change, but only turned around so it looked like it was changed.
For eleven trouble-free years, I drove my faithful Volvo. It performed so well that I had no incentive to learn why it worked so well - until six months ago. My first instinct was to have professional mechanics resolve my original fuel starvation problem. It is an instinct I am now well cured of. Just knowing that all of you were here and willing to help enabled me to summon the courage I needed to grab the problem by the ears and kick it in the as*.
As you know from my first posts here, my Volvo suffered a catastrophic fuel system failure due to a decomposed fuel filter. The paper element of the filter broke apart and particles of it clogged and seized every component of my CIS fuel system - except for the accumulator. The professional mechanics charged alot, but did very little...except make excuses...and stuff my cash into their pocket. After several weeks, my car was was given back to me with a new main pump and a new pre-pump, but the car was still in a barely drivable condition, and I was told that it was "fixed". That was six months ago, and I have been troubleshooting and repairing many layers worth of problems ever since. During the original fuel starvation issue, my wife was driving the car, and instead of calling our roadside service and towing, she thought she could drive the car home while it was "bucking" like bronco.
The continued driving of the fuel-starved car caused violent shaking throughout the car and all of it's 28 year-old systems. Almost everything that could be affected by continuous, jolting trauma was cracked or broken. I read every post that had anything to do with hesitation and power-loss under load. Most of the posts had at least one person who said that the pre-pump was the prime suspect. I read those posts, but I set them aside, because a professional foreign-car mechanic had installed a new pre-pump in my car. To my mind, at the time, it couldn't be the pre-pump...so I looked everywhere else. I replaced my broken catalytic converter...thinking it was back-pressure. It wasn't. I replaced all the injectors, plug wires, plugs, Idle air motor, cleaned the throttle body, replaced the coil, replaced the condenser, adjusted and cleaned the airflow assembly and venturi-plate, installed a new air-bellows and air-intake hose. I installed a new engine harness and oil separator and flame-trap. I installed a new ECU and a known-good ICU. I changed the cap and rotor. I installed a new hall sender unit. I installed new pins on the hall sender pig-tail. I installed a new remanufactured fuel distributor. I installed a new remanufactured warm up regulator. I replaced x 4 my timing belt. Nothing made the hesitation and low power under load go away. I was beyond frustrated. I had worked my way from front to back, and was about to go back the other direction.
In frustration, I grabbed my mechanic's stethoscope, layed on the ground, and placed the probe against the gas tank to see if I could hear the pre-pump. I could hear it operating just fine! I was so beyond frustration...then I remembered a post that I had read about cracks or holes in the rubber transfer hose. I opened up the area in the back of the wagon to expose the top of the sending unit. I saw that it was going to be quite involved to get those hoses off, so I decided to go to the gas station and fill up the tank and see if it made any difference. It did. It made a big difference. When the tank got down to about half, the hesitation and loss of power returned. I found my answer. choirs of angels began singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the background. Today I pulled the sending unit out and found that the rubber transfer hose was installed incorrectly, and one of the clamps had come off, and the hose was mostly off on the upper end (hose was also too short) - air was getting in. I am now so jaded against "professional" mechanics, that i doubt I'll ever trust another one with my car....I'll do it myself....even if it takes six months!
A special shout-out to Art, Darkdelta, lucid, Dan, and goatman for all your help and insight. Oh my, look at that, the bottle is half gone! Time to go the bathroom! The Swede-Steed rides again! Whoo hoo!
finally did it.
|
