FinnJohn
21st November 2007, 01:36 AM
Well ... about two weeks ago, the fuel delivery in my Lancia got really bad again. So I backed it up on the ramps, pulled the tank, emptied out about six gallons of fuel into buckets to settle, blasted it out with carb cleaner, shook it, rinsed, emptied, filled with Simple Green and hot water, agitated, dried thoroughly, etc., etc., and reinstalled. Also bought it a new fuel filter. Put the gas back in it. There was no change in how it drove. If anything, it was worse. It actually crapped completely out on the test run, coasted over to the side of the road and everything.
Discouraged, I posted it on Craigslist for a grand. Who needs this crap, I grumbled to myself.
This threat appears to have frightened the Beta into running beautifully all of a sudden. I drove to the gas station that night and put $20 in the tank. Since then, I have had NO stall issues. (It does still buck and balk when driving under 2500 revs under light loads at 20-30 per. But I think this is an injector thing.)
Anyway, I got all inspired and spent a couple mornings working on it. First I swapped in the steering column control cluster from the parts car. Nice -- no more sticking my fingers into the column and shoving stuff to work the wipers ... Also, I got the speedo cluster swapped out with the parts car's (with working instrument lights) and put a new radio in; since I didn't fancy trying to figure out which column wire is the ignition, I wired the radio to one of the blank switches and now to turn it on I hit the switch next to the flashers. I also used one of the blanks to control a 30-amp relay to the cooling fan. The car was already wired for a remote switch to control that fan. The PO had tried to use a blank switch too, but it melted so he installed a beefy, ugly toggle in the footwell. I ditched it, pulled an unmelted blank switch out of the parts car and wired everything through a 30-amp relay. (At first I thought I needed to pull the fan from the parts car. Turns out the ground had gone bad in the harness where the fan plugs in, so it wasn't responding to the current. When I grounded it with a test lead, it worked great.)
I totally forgot about the Craigslist ad. Then this afternoon, after I did that work, I got an e-mail on it. Luckily, it wasn't a buyer -- it was a fellow Zagato owner from Eugene sharing some advice for solving my fuel problem! Belatedly, I pulled the ad. In two weeks, that's the only response I got on it.
OK, sorry about the long blab. I'm just really fired up about it and had to share.
Cheers!
--Finn John (81 Zagato)
Corvallis/Albany, Ore., USA
Discouraged, I posted it on Craigslist for a grand. Who needs this crap, I grumbled to myself.
This threat appears to have frightened the Beta into running beautifully all of a sudden. I drove to the gas station that night and put $20 in the tank. Since then, I have had NO stall issues. (It does still buck and balk when driving under 2500 revs under light loads at 20-30 per. But I think this is an injector thing.)
Anyway, I got all inspired and spent a couple mornings working on it. First I swapped in the steering column control cluster from the parts car. Nice -- no more sticking my fingers into the column and shoving stuff to work the wipers ... Also, I got the speedo cluster swapped out with the parts car's (with working instrument lights) and put a new radio in; since I didn't fancy trying to figure out which column wire is the ignition, I wired the radio to one of the blank switches and now to turn it on I hit the switch next to the flashers. I also used one of the blanks to control a 30-amp relay to the cooling fan. The car was already wired for a remote switch to control that fan. The PO had tried to use a blank switch too, but it melted so he installed a beefy, ugly toggle in the footwell. I ditched it, pulled an unmelted blank switch out of the parts car and wired everything through a 30-amp relay. (At first I thought I needed to pull the fan from the parts car. Turns out the ground had gone bad in the harness where the fan plugs in, so it wasn't responding to the current. When I grounded it with a test lead, it worked great.)
I totally forgot about the Craigslist ad. Then this afternoon, after I did that work, I got an e-mail on it. Luckily, it wasn't a buyer -- it was a fellow Zagato owner from Eugene sharing some advice for solving my fuel problem! Belatedly, I pulled the ad. In two weeks, that's the only response I got on it.
OK, sorry about the long blab. I'm just really fired up about it and had to share.
Cheers!
--Finn John (81 Zagato)
Corvallis/Albany, Ore., USA