Yesterday… the 28th (USA time).
Originally, I set my alarm for like 7:30, but after thinking about it for a little while and not wanting to be up for very long without the owner of the house up, I decided to get up right about 8:00, so that I could just jump right on the phone and start calling the junk yards.
So after a relatively decent night sleep, using up some of my precious battery life in order to use my white noise maker to be able to fall asleep, I got up and started making the calls. I woke up before the homeowner, so I just sat on the front driveway chatting with various businesses, or trying to, at least.
Apparently, the local Hokitika junkyard was closed for the entire holidays, which seems to be a trend here on the West Coast, with junk yards and mechanic shops being closed for the entire holidays. Great for them, but heaven help you if you need car repair. 🙃
I also called the junkyard in greymouth, and they said they might have something that would work, so that was a little hopeful. And I put the fuel pump on hold at the repco that’s also in Greymouth.
The homeowner, jared, didn’t get up until somewhere around 9:15 when I finally gently said “hello?” He had told me that he was going to be up by 8:00, but by 9:15, and me still the only person wandering the house, I figured it was probably time to try and wake him up. 😅
Gratefully, he was super cool, and he had a lady who lived there, not sure if she was related or not, give me a ride into town because she was already headed into town. She dropped me off on the North end of hokitika to make it easier for me to get a ride north.
Gratefully again, it didn’t take too long, maybe 5 or 10 minutes of walking with my thumb out before a very kind gentleman picked me up and drove me all the way not only to greymouth, but to the junkyard, where he waited for me to see if they had a fuel pump assembly that would work.
We also had some great conversations on the way over, talking about his life and everything. He had a stroke a handful of years back, so he was dealing with constant pain on one side of his body but medications couldn’t touch. Having dealt with chronic pain myself for many years, though not to the level that he’s dealing with, I could empathize.
Anyway, the junkyard that I went to, I probably should have put the words junkyard in quotes, as they probably had a grand total of maybe 40 cars, probably even fewer than that. And they clearly didn’t know much about cars, as they thought a minivan would have the same fuel pump as the wagon that we’ve been driving. 🙃
So after a wild goose chase trying to get the full pump assembly, which was much more desirable than trying to rebuild the old one, I gave up, and the wonderful gentleman drove me over to repco. He actually needed to buy something from the store right next to repco, so it worked out pretty well.
And thus began the saga of disassembly and reassembly of the fuel pump. The gentleman who had been talking to me over the phone, nathan, had everything I was needing waiting for me at the counter when I got there. Of course, not having any tools, I also asked if I could borrow their box cutter as I was thinking I would probably need to cut some of the fuel hose. So he gave me the box cutter and I headed out side to the parking lot, where I found a place leaning against the building in the shade and started staring at the fuel pump assembly trying to figure out the least destructive manner of disassembling the contraption.
The fuel pump was manufactured by Bosch a German company, and they had instead of using fuel hose and clamps, had used heat shrinking plastic lines going from the bottom of the pump assembly to the top of the pump assembly, from the pump itself to the midsection, and I think from the midsection to the top of the pump assembly. There were three completely separate plastic heat shrink style fuel lines, and the only way to get them off was to cut them off (with the exception of one end of one of the lines). But if you cut them off, then… You can’t really put them back on, because you’ve put a cut in the hose that’s supposed to have a seal on it.
So I stared at the pump assembly for quite a while. Then I started very gently taking things off little by little, doing my absolute best to not damage anything. It took a good little while to figure out how they had assembled the contraption, as if I broke it, there was no going back from that.
So I figured out how they had assembled it, and was able to get it disassembled. However, I did have to cut one of the molded lines, so that was one of the biggest questions of the whole job. Could I get it back together and able to seal fuel properly, or would it squirt fuel out the side of the cut and reduce the fuel pressure to the point that the car couldn’t run properly.
I kept going back in the store to borrow more and more and more tools, and they gratefully and kindly lent me screwdrivers, wire cutters, pliers, and other such things in my efforts to replace just a little pump inside the fuel sending unit assembly.
First I disassembled the fuel level sensor assembly from the rest of the sending unit. Then I figured out how to pop the outside shell away from the inside unit. Then I had to figure out which line and to cut that would be most likely to be reusable. That ended up being the main fuel line where it connects to the top of the fuel sending unit assembly.
So with a box cutter, I started putting a slit in the connection little by little, trying to cut as little as possible to get it off the main plastic nipple on the sending unit head.
Then I had to figure out how to get the filter off the housing (which, of course, needed to be pried off, and it’s never comfortable to try and pry something off when you don’t know exactly how it comes apart). Once I’d gotten the fuel level sensor off, the top and bottom partially separated, the inside removed from the outside, and the fuel filter off, i had to figure out how to get the actual pump out of the sending unit assembly.
Gratefully, since I had been at the junkyard earlier with the guy trying to get me a fuel pump out of a Toyota van, when he realized that the fuel sending unit itself was completely different, he thought maybe the pump inside would be the same. so he disassembled the pump housing, and in order to pop the pump out, he just smacked it out of the rest of the unit. having seen him do that, even though it was a completely different sending unit design, I thought maybe it might be the same for getting the pump itself out of the housing; so I tried that, and was able to successfully pop the pump out of the rest of the housing. 🥳
Reassembling the unit was a lot easier than taking it apart because I knew exactly how it all went back together. There were only two real concerns at this point: would the two fuel line ends that I needed to reconnect clamp down properly, one of them was just a different style of clamp, so I figured it should be just fine. But the other was the one that I had to cut off. So I got a clamp, clamped it together, and called it good, crossing my fingers that it would work just fine.
I started walking to the southern end of the town, trying to get to a place where anybody that passed my way was likely going a decent distance. I did try and hitchhike a little bit in the town, but didn’t make any headway at all, so I stopped off at a grocery store to buy some food because it was three or so in the afternoon, I hadn’t eaten anything since the day before, and then I walked to the other side of the town.
I did, of course, try and hitchhike the entire way out of town, but again, I didn’t have any luck while I was still within town limits, so to speak. Once I walked across the huge bridge but the south end of town, I actually got a ride very quickly from a guy from the Netherlands who took me all the way from Greymouth to where Chase and I had broken down on the side of the road, with a quick stop in fotaroa where Chase and I had done our helicopter trip.
So finally, after nearly 24 hours of hitchhiking and trying to disassemble and reassemble a pump, I was back with Chase on the side of the road ready to install our pump.
🥳
Before completely installing it, we hooked it all up to verify everything was good, turned the key, and cranked the engine.
Nothing. No start. Same problem. 😶
The adventure has taken a decided turn for the… less enjoyable.
So there we were, stuck in the same place with the same problem.
What the heck?!?!
Again, I verified the voltage. It was good. There was vintage getting to the pump. So we took the pump out again, bench tested it directly to the battery, and it worked just fine.
Without all my tools and equipment, this was not easy, by the way. 🙃 We were jimmying things right hand left, manufacturing testing equipment and tools and whatnot. Pretty crazy. 🙃
Then we grabbed the old pump that we thought was bad, I broke the plastic off the ends because the makeshift testing equipment that we could come up with couldn’t reach the little prongs, and the pump was broken by this point anyway from trying to get it out of the assembly, but once we were able to get wired directly connected to the positive and negative terminals on the pump, it also pumped just fine.
So there we were on the side of the road with the exact same problem as we had before, but this time with one piece of added information. We were getting voltage, but we were not getting amps. I have verified that the ground was good, so it was all down to the fact that somehow, some way or another, we weren’t getting the amps through the circuit that you needed to get.
In all of my time as a mechanic, I think I’ve run across this issue maybe two or three other times, but there we were on the side of the road in West Coast New Zealand hours away from tools and supplies and parts with one of the rarest issues that I’ve ever had to deal with.
Joy.
Unfortunately, my mood soured rather quickly with all of this going on, and I was pretty frustrated. What added to my frustration was the fact that I had remembered while I was hitchhiking but I wanted to pick up jumper cables and extra wire just in case we had to direct wire the fuel pump directly to the battery. But of course, in the middle of trying to get everything done, I completely forgot to buy the jumper cables and the extra wire.
So what did we do? What do we always do?
Jimmy rig. 🙃
We didn’t have any automotive wire, but the entire top of our car was completely wrapped up in Christmas lights, so we cut up the Christmas lights split the insulation off the sides, and I wired direct Christmas light wires directly from the battery to the fuel pump, and boom! The car fired up! 😁
As I was manufacturing longer-term jumper wires that from the battery to the fuel pump that I wouldn’t have to hold on place, Chase, meanwhile, thinking about my diagnosis of voltage but no amps, started trying to get to the wires in the circuit to see what he might find.
He struck gold! It wasn’t too long onto his exploratory search that he stumbled upon a mess. Someone in the past has cut the fuel pump main hot wire, most likely trying to tie in the aftermarket backup camera this thing has, but did a terrible job putting it back together. They tried to solder it, but there just created a ball of solder that was barely sticking one end of the wire to the other.
Problem found!!!
Then Chase proceeded to use strip probably a dozen stands of Christmas light wire into one wire with a gauge big enough to handle the load, spliced it in with the butt connectors I’d brought back with me, and boom! We were in business!!! The car roared back to life and started going.
Problem solved. 🥳
Wahoo!!!
A nice Indian pastor and his family stopped to see if we needed help, and they hung out and chatted with us for a while, giving us food and water. That as really nice of them. Their own car had blown up not very long before that.
So yeah, we loaded everything up, and headed to the nearest town, where we had hopes of finding some wire that was, uh, more permanent than cannibalized Christmas lights strung 12ish splices thick with blue sticky tack to keep the connectors dry and safe from touching each other. 🙃
So we fixed our first breakdown with a kitchen knife. We fixed our second breakdown with gasket maker. And we fixed our third one with Christmas lights and sticky tack.
Whaddya think, Grandad? 😎
🙃
I’m gonna vote for no more breakdowns. 🤞🙂
From there, we drove to Franz Joseph, but it as too late to find any stores open.
There was a girl from California there (Emily) who needed to get gas, but it wasn’t accepting her card, so I got to do a little pay it forward action, and asked someone who was getting gas there if they wouldn’t mind paying for her tank with their card, and I gave him the little cash that she had paid for the rest with the cash that I had. She was super grateful, wanting to pay it back, but I told her to just pay it forward. 🙂
Chase and I reorganized the car, again, since it was torn apart with all the work we were doing, and then we headed out of the town to find a place to sleep, crashing at a out on the main highway.
If you’re not already doing it, please take a moment to think about how you can leave every person and every place better than you found them. 🙂
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 