Last night when I was leaving work, my little Nissan 720 pickup with the 2.4L inline 4 banger made it almost out of the employee parking lot and died. I started it again, and it died again. OK, time for a little problem daignosis. Turned the key to "on" and sat there looking at gauges and it finally sank in that it was awfully quiet. By that, I mean that I couldn't hear the fuel pump running. It's a Holley Blue pump, and when it's running, I can
definitely hear it. OK, not getting any juice to the fuel pump.
At this point, it's about 1:30 in the morning, and (1) I don't want to call the wife and wake her up to come and get me, plus (2) the truck is blocking the driveway out of the employee lot. So I called AAA to come by and tow me home, which they did.
This morning, I grabbed a couple of wrenches and sockets and a test light and crawled under the truck. On Nissan trucks of that vintage, there is a metal cover over the fuel pump which I had to remove to get at the pump wiring. Popped that off, turned the ignition on and checked for power going to the pump. Nothing. My first thought was that one of the wires had come loose or broken, but all the wires were fine.
So at that point I decided to start from the beginning and check for power at different places in the circuit. First place to start looking is the fuse box, see if the fuel pump fuse is blown, which I thought was a pretty strong possibility. Pulled the fuse box cover off and popped the fuel pump fuse out and the fuse itself looked perfect. Definitely not blown or burned. However, the terminals that plugged into the fuse box looked kind of ratty and slightly corroded (it's an '83 truck, and I think that's the original fuse from the factory), so I carefully took a wire brush to the terminals, and in a minute or so, they were all bright and shiny, so I put the fuse back in the fuse box. Then turned the key to "on" again, and lo and behold, the pump woke up and was pumping away like mad. Problem solved.
When I was turning wrenches for a living a few hundred years ago, one of the things I was taught as a beginner was to check for the simple solutions first when you're diagnosing a problem, and this was a classic case of that. A little bit of corrosion on a fuse terminal had put my truck out of action, and it took about ten minutes to cure that and get her back on the road again.
So the lesson in all this is, don't make assumptions when you're trying to figure out what a problem is. Start with the simple, easy, and sometimes obvious things first and work your way up to the more complicated stuff later on. You can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation some of the time, and even if you don't, it's still a good habit to get into. The old "Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle still works. I'm living proof of that.
