So yesterday went to put coolant in the car, and that kicked off a somewhat lousy train of events, as follows:
1. Put coolant in and turned the car on.
2. Immediately small gasoline. WTF. Look under the hood and....
3. Find that the injection hose from the fuel rail return to the hard pipe running under the intake manifold is literally spraying fuel downward. Quick kill-switch action. Apparently the fuel injection clamp somehow had loosened itself up substantially and was leaking. Wonder how long it's been doing that??? Hadn't noticed it previously. My car has smelled a bit gassy for a while but assumed it was from my charcoal-canister delete. Perhaps not. So, pulled the hose, thinking it may be damaged, put a new one on with new clamps. That's good to go.
4. Turn car back on and run it to temp to bleed the coolant system, with front of car jacked up. I had already filled the radiator through the upper hose. Notice coolant dripping fast under the car. At first thought I hadn't tightened the radiator drain plug, but after looking up I see it's coming from the upper radiator hose. Apparently I did not actually tighten that one when I put the hoses back on. Whoops.
5. Gauge shows car is up to running temp after about 10 minutes, a bit over 200....but oddly the fan isn't kicking in, and the lower hose is still ice-cold. Heat in the car is blowing lukewarm. Figure air in the system, so I burp hoses, etc. Temp keeps creeping up to 220. Still no fan, and doesn't seem like the thermostat has opened. Shut the car down again. Annoyed, figuring I'm gonna have to do a thermostat replacement, which is a bit of a hassle with the M50 compared to other e30 engines. So, call it an evening.
6. Today, get to thinking maybe with the front of the car jacked up, there's an air pocket at the thermostat stopping the it from opening at the correct temp. So, put the car back down on the ground, burp the hoses again, and start run it to temp again. Looks like my guess was right, because this time the thermo opens on time (verified with my IR thermometer), lower hose warms up, and interior heat warms up more. Meanwhile, after idle and 5 minutes of running around 3k rpm, temp is holding at just around 205 (fans not kicked on yet, but outlet of rad where the fan switch is certainly would be cooler than 205).
7. While running, I am in the car and want to tidy up some wiring. Reach behind the center dash section and as my hand bumps a wire, the car stumbles, then kicks back on. This happens 4-5 times as I try to figure out what wire caused this (narrowing it down to the ignition toggle switch wiring). Figure must be a loose connection.
8. Unscrew the faceplate of the center dash and tilt it out (car still running). There's a pop, puff of smoke, and car dies. Master kill still on, but no power to it. So....look back at the big fuse in the truck (aftermarket slow-blow fuse, not the OEM one). It's blown. Hmm.
9. So start digging into wiring looking for a burnt wire, obvious ground, etc. All the while remembering "it's probably the wire for the ignition circuit" The wires look fine, nothing obvious, so I pull the switch, thinking maybe it's internally shorted or something (not sure how that woudl be possible, but whatever). When I pull it, I notice a small part of the heat-shrink on the wire terminal (wire side) is worn away and showing bare metal. So i guess when I was jiggling it that touched something else (another ground wire, the metal frame of the switch panel?) and when I pulled out the panel it made full contact and blew the big fuse.
10. In any case, put on new terminals with new shrink wrap and some plastic loom for extra protection. Put in a new 60A slow-blow fuse in the main battery circuit, and did some othe wiring cleanup and now everythign works fine again.
Takeaways:
- when it rains, it pours
- my haphazard wiring over the years has never caused any real issues, but it's definitely time to clean it up better and secure it better this winter. This was already the plan, but now it's going to kick in faster.
- happy to see the car idling under 205 now. In the past it's been around 210-212. So, hopefully the 3-row radiator will have a noticeable difference in temps vs. the old 2-row. I'll run the car hard this weekend and see where it's sitting then.
- I do have another cooling project coming up, stay tuned for that at some point.
- never much thought of checking fuel injection clamps as part of regular maintenance, but now I will.
- all in all, my usual attention to detail seems to be lacking somewhat recently, as I've put my car efforts mostly in to the Porsche and Raider projects. Time to buckle down and give the e30 a good going-through this winter, I think. It's boring, but really I've run this car mostly "as-is" for years with minimal "checking" of things. Happy the things today were found today and not on stage where they'd have really sucked.