In case you were wondering, this is what it looks like to be elbow deep into a wiring problem on a Porsche 914 1.8. My six-year-old battery is on its last legs so it is constantly hooked up to a jumper/charger. The charger to my surprise hasn’t blown up from many years of abuse sparking the clips together and trying to jump rust bucket car batteries that were left for dead.
A second set of clamps from a timing light hook onto the charger leads. I had fantasies of getting the car timing dialed in after replacing the burnt points with a Hot Spark electronic ignition last week. Now the light serves to tell that I actually have spark. If you thought a strobe light looked good in 7th grade, try looking at one blinking when you think your car has no spark. The small little red, green and yellow jumper wires fed off of the positive battery terminal serve to test/jump the fuel pump, the 88a lead off the relay that powers the ECU and to jump-start the car so I don’t have to keep going in the cab to turn the key.
What I’ve determined through testing and many, many text messages with my friend Tim is that I don’t know shit about how to trouble shoot a car that has intermittent wiring problems. The wiring harness was rebuilt and with the Hot Spark installed the car fired right up. It actually sounded pretty good until it died. It was like before when I burnt the points with a cut condenser wire. I thought for a while the electronic ignition burned out.
As Tim and I continued to run tests while the weather was warm in Michigan we ran into a bit of a snag. I loaned my digital volt meter to my neighbor and the analog one I have wasn’t measuring ohms from the coil negative to the battery accurately. I have the digital meter back and will try again soon. Then once I have everything running correctly, I will button up the tangled web we weave so we can practice the machine.
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