More fuel issues!

 Thursday and Friday I decided to take the Blue car to work to test drive it. I had recently changed the differential. Again! The test drive showed that I had at last got rid of the awful vibration at 60mph that has been plaguing this car, although the replacement I fitted is still fairly noisy between 30 and 50mph, so I'm still on the look out for a nice quiet diff. 

After leaving work on Friday night, I didn't get very far before the car just cut out and died leaving me stranded halfway over a railway bridge. 

 All the symptoms pointed to loss of fuel even though the fuel gauge was reading just over quarter of a tank. I bounced the car up and down with the fuel cap open, but couldn't hear any fuel sloshing about. I then rang my work place and one of the guys there found a can and went and bought me some more petrol. While he was doing that, I decided to remove the fuel line and blow down it to see if there was an obstruction. Annoyingly one of the plastic nozzles on the Huco electric fuel pump snapped off while I was trying to remove the rubber fuel line. 

With no way of fixing it I had no choice but to ring my insurance company breakdown line who then had to arrange recovery. They sent a patrol van out first even though I had told them it was unfixable. The patrol man arrived, tried to fix the broken nozzle for an hour with glue. (Even though I told him that petrol will just melt the glue!) After his unsuccessful attempt and wasting a lot of time he then radioed in and told control I needed recovering! (Which is what I originally told them two hours previously!)  after another long wait for recovery, I eventually got home at 1am Saturday Morning! 

After replacing the nozzle on the fuel pump on Saturday morning, a friend of mine investigated the 'over reading fuel gauge' issue. It turns out that the float in the fuel tank had been fitted the wrong way round and was possibly catching on the side of the tank. Also, where the sender unit was seated it, it could be in two positions. In one position the gauge was showing empty and the low fuel warning light on the dash was on, (Which is correct with only a gallon of fuel in it)  in the other position, it was reading quarter of a tank and no warning light on. (Which it was when I ran out of fuel!) 

This would also explain why on the recent weekend drive along the south coast, my gauge appeared to be stuck on full all the time. If my car was always on three quarters of a tank (which is likely with the the amount of fuel stops we did) it would have been reading full. So hopefully, this is resolved now and I wont be running out of petrol anymore while still thinking I have quarter of a tank left!