A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vintage -- Part IV

Last week, while working on Brian Ach’s ’73 2002tii that died on the way to The Vintage, I stumbled into Rust Central. I found rust in the car’s fuel pump, gas tank, and fuel lines. I cleaned it all out and installed a new fuel pump, yet the problem persisted. I chased it into that chamber of nightmares that is the fuel injection system itself, following the troubleshooting procedure detailed in BMW’s 2002tii Fuel Injection manual. The symptoms— seeing what appeared to be bubbles of fuel and air through the translucent plastic fuel line on #4 only, having virtually no fuel come out #4 when I cracked open that line, the car not running much rougher with #4 line disconnected, and the problem not switching cylinders when I swapped delivery and suction valves—seemed to point to the problem being in the Kugelfischer injection pump itself.

Now, everyone, myself included, says to suspect the injection pump last. And that was certainly the case here, particularly since this pump had just been rebuilt by one of the five people in the country who specialize in such work. But diagnosis is diagnosis. And, with all that rust, sediment, and scale found in the fuel lines, the fuel tank, and the fuel pump, how could it not have contaminated the injection? Plus, there was the mystery of the ripped screen at the inlet of the injection pump. Had those shreds of brass gotten into the pump and bollixed it up?

As I said last week, the injection pump is a fabulous mechanical contrivance. There’s a good explanation of its functionality in the official manual for the 2002tii fuel injection system (http://www.2002tii.org/pump/pump_guide_v1.pdf), but the basic approach is “no user serviceable parts inside.” Was it even possible for rusty gas to contaminate the injection pump and cause the symptoms I was seeing? If so, could I understand the mechanism by which that could happen and fix it?

I searched on bmw2002faq.com and found a very informative thread about how a stuck piston in the injection pump could cause some of the symptoms I was seeing. The thread also said that you could unstick pistons by removing the suction valves (which exposes the tops of the pistons) and simply pressing down on them with a non-marring rod like a pencil eraser. I didn’t understand. I mean, if it’s a piston, how can you unstick it just by pressing down on it? Isn’t it rigidly attached by something like a connecting rod? But the thread also said, basically, “don’t be afraid of pulling the head off the injection pump to expose the pistons. It’s really not that big of a deal.” One of the contributors to the thread was Bill Williams, a very knowledgeable tii guy not prone to telling folks to jump off a cliff.

Symptoms fit? Source good? Procedure not a fool’s errand? Right. I’m going in.

For reams of detail on my trip in Kugelfischerpumpland, check out the technical article I wrote about it and posted on 2002faq:

http://www.bmw2002faq.com/topic/167715-what-i-learned-pulling-the-head-off-the-kugelfischer-pump/

Long story short (or shorter), you read about how the Kugelfisher pump is like a little piston motor that squirts fuel into the injector lines (it even uses that description in the official manual), but that’s more than a little misleading. The pump does have a camshaft with lobes, and pushrods, and little bores, and little “pistons” that run in those bores, and a head that sits on the top of the pump, making you think the rest of the pump is like a block. But it’s not. The little cylinder bores are actually in the head, not in the block. And the things that run up and down in them are referred to in the manual not as pistons, but as spring-loaded plungers. This is why you can push down on them to unstick them; they’re not rigidly attached.

(The little numbs in the pic below of the bottom end of the KFish pump are the pushrods.)

(This is the underside of the pump head showing the cylinder bores.)

(Here’s the underside of the head, upside down, with the four spring-loaded plungers in their bores.)

But, to get to the immediate point, no one tells you that the spring-loaded plungers go into the little bores from the underside of the head, so when you lift the head off the pump, the plungers and their little springs and clips simply fall out. This is, you know, kind of important. If you’re lucky, all four plungers, springs, and clips stay together and drop down inside the bottom end of the pump, which is scary but not that big of a deal as long as the springs and clips stay on the plungers (ie, big pieces of metal falling inside a Swiss watch is sort of okay because you can easily pick them out, but small pieces of metal would be really bad).

Of course if you’re unlucky like me, one of them doesn’t drop into the pump. You see something silver out of the corner of your eye, hear it go clank, and then… only silence, darkness, and pain.

Plunger overboard!

Yup, to my horror, one of them did not drop straight down into the pump. It went over the side, somewhere between the pump and the battery. Straight into darkness, as Tom Petty said. I spent hours looking in the engine compartment and on the garage floor. I jacked up the car. I felt everywhere around the top of the front subframe. I even used a borescope to look in the crevice at the back of the left frame rail (the place that swallows whole wrenches) and in the gap between the left engine mount and the steering box. I even took the alternator and its bracket completely off to be certain the plunger hadn’t fallen into the recesses behind it. Nothing.

I had decapitated someone else’s KFish pump and dropped and lost a plunger.

I was mortified.

Now, I have two old Kugelfischer pumps in unknown condition kicking around the garage. One was removed from an engine I pulled out of a rusty tii 30 years ago, cam’d and Weber’d it, and installed it into Bertha (which my friend Alex still owns). The other is from another friend’s car; he replaced it with a rebuilt KFish pump. I thought I could just yank a plunger out of one of them and rescue myself from my own idiocy. But on both pumps, some of the bolts holding on the pump head were seized. After drilling out the stuck bolts on one of the heads, I cleaned one of the plungers, and tried to put it into a bore in the head from Brian’s pump.

It didn’t fit.

What the…?

I looked on 2002faq and learned that, in fact, there are very rare racing pumps with oversized bores and plungers, but I measured the plungers I’d just removed, and this wasn’t one of them. Its plungers were very close in size to the ones in Brian’s pump, just ever so slightly larger enough that fitting them felt like forcing them.

I posted this debacle on Facebook, and in the kind of supportive action that makes you glad to be part of a tightly-knit enthusiast community, CCA member Karel Jennings responded “I have a Kugelfischer setup that came with an engine I bought years ago and installed Megasquirt onto. Want me to send you the pump head and four plungers? I have injectors as well; I’d be glad to send those too.” With a grateful response on my end, the spare pump head and plungers were on the way.

I then called Ben Thongsai (he who heals cars with his mind, and who said I should’ve convinced Brian to have his car towed to The Vintage, that we could’ve fixed it there) and picked his brain about the problem in general and the non-fitting plungers in particular. Ben said he thought it was likely that, when the KFish pumps were built, sets of plungers were probably hand-selected and hand-fitted to bores, so it was conceivable that plunger sets from one pump head might be slightly too tight or too loose for another pump head. Ben also confirmed that heads and plunger sets should swap freely between pumps—that, if I never found the fourth plunger to Brian’s original pump head, there should be no issue with swapping over the entire head and plunger set from another pump. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Ben also offered that, with hindsight, there were two things I could’ve tried before pulling the pump head off. The first was to remove all four suction valves, remove the KFish pump belt, and turn the pulley by hand and verify you can see all four plungers going up and down. If a plunger didn’t move, the second thing to try was, as I read in 2002faq, to push a small non-marring dowel onto the top of the plunger to free it. Hearing that, I began to think that, the rusty gas notwithstanding, perhaps Ben might have been able to work his magic had he been the one in the parking lot instead of me (pull the suction valve, press down on the plunger, problem gone, shucks, no big deal, see you at The Vintage—just the kind of thing he’d do). Unfortunately, I’d used the big hammer of yanking the pump head, so there was no way to know what I might have seen had I tried these measures (though my left brain said “crikey, all four plungers simply fell out; how could any of them have been stuck?”).

Ben and I talked about this, and he, in fact, was highly doubtful of the stuck plunger theory. He said that that stuck plungers were far more likely to be found in cars that had sat for years, and thought it unlikely that a running pump would suddenly stick a plunger while the car was going down the road.

Lastly was the mystery of the #4 fuel line. Ben couldn’t explain why I was seeing bubbles of air and fuel in the #4 injection line, but agreed that it was damned strange.

Since I could not for the life of me find the AWOL plunger, and since the head and plungers Karel sent hadn’t arrived yet, I took the head and plungers I’d pulled off one of my old pumps and prepared to swap them onto Brian’s pump. I cleaned the head, blowing out the passageways first with carb cleaner, then with compressed air. I did this for both my spare head as well as the original head from Brian’s pump, just in case his errant plunger showed its face. This was a hugely valuable exercise in several ways.

First, I learned that the head itself is dumb, really consists of nothing but passageways.

Second, in cleaning all those passageways out, I could reassure myself I was creating a clean fuel delivery environment.

Third, in cleaning Brian’s head, I did not, in fact, encounter any passageways clogged with rust and scale (e.g., no rust maggots were driven out by the cleaning).

Fourth, I saw firsthand that there’s really no way for even the most disgusting rusty mung-laden fuel to somehow contaminate the bottom end of the pump (e.g., “what happens in the head stays in the head”).

Lastly, by disassembling the pump, I could see why you can just stick a non-marring rod down the bore to move the plunger. You can look at the manual, but it makes much more sense when you actually take the head off and look at it. My losing a plunger notwithstanding, the 2002faq thread I read was right: Pulling the head off really isn’t a big deal. Next time, I’d just wrap my fingers around the back side of the head to hold the plungers when removing or reinstalling. In addition, Ben recommended a dab of Vaseline in the bores to keep the plungers in place (Vaseline dissolves in gas).

I installed the cleaned-up spare head and plungers, put in all four suction valves and the #4 delivery valve from my own tii, put everything back together, checked for leaks, and drove the car. I mentally prepared to pop the Champagne.

And…

No difference. The car stumbled just as badly as before.

This. Is. Not. Happening.

There were three things I could do. The first was ritual suicide with a tii warmup regulator piston tool. It’s pointy and nasty. If you’re going to sever entrails and bring on slow infected death, this is the baby you want.

The second was to suck it up, take a deep breath, yank the Kugelfischer pump out of my own tii, and install it in Brian’s car. Because I was running out of things it could be.The third, of course, was to consider that my troubleshooting had been flawed. Even though it pointed to the pump, not the injectors, the fact that the #4 fuel line exhibited those weird bubbles was still unexplained. And pulling an injector is so much easier than pulling the pump. What have I got to lose?

I pulled the #4 intake plenum, removed #4 injector, unscrewed the two halves of its housing, and found… this. Although there was obvious evidence of mechanical failure, with a loose small rod and what looked like a piece of a retaining clip of some sort, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing.

The 2002tii injection manual has the following cross section of an injector. In it, you can clearly see the lower and upper housing, the injector core, and the spring inside the core, but I couldn’t see the little rod I’d found.

I never cease to be amazed by how much I learn by taking something apart and simply looking at it. Below is the disassembled broken injector. The upper housing is on the left, then the loose rod and spring fragment, then the injector core, then the spacer and washer, and finally the lower housing.

Below is a close-up of the injector core.

Finally, below is a closeup of the core with the seat and spring pulled out of it.

For comparison, this is a view from the top of a good injector core showing the little rod in place, going through the loop at the top of the spring.

Finally, I understood. That little rod holds the top end of the spring in place. This wasn’t a broken “retaining clip.” This was the spring that the high-pressure fuel pushes against.

It was official: #4 injector had a broken spring. There was nothing holding the injector closed.

And, finally, I had a window into both the mystery of fuel and air bubbles in the #4 injection line as well as why the car was running so badly but seemed to pick up at higher rpm. The injection pump is supposed to be pushing against a closed injector, with the injector only opening when there’s 500 psi pushing on it. Instead, the injector was just flopping around. At higher engine load and rpm, the injection pump may have pushed enough fuel that some of the spurt from the pump made it through the line, past the floppy injector, into the cylinder. Just a theory. A better theory is “let’s replace this broken piece of garbage with something functional and see what it does.”

I thought… this has got to be it. How can this not be it? Can I say “eureka” now? Oh we’re close. We’re very close. I felt like I was in the Hack Mechanic equivalent of one of Sting’s year-long tantric orgasms.

More than anything, I wanted to yank one injector from my tii, swap it into Brian’s car, drive it, and see the problem solved. I thought “I could do this in 15 minutes and KNOW.” But… no. “I chased this thing down the rabbit hole,” I thought, “and the rabbit hole just branched into four. I am going to check all four branches.”

So I pulled the other three injectors.

They all were rusty.

Eur… no. Don’t say it. It ain’t over ‘till the fat lady squirts fuel.

Clearly Brian needed an injector to replace the broken one, and the others needed to be cleaned and tested. We talked about what to do. I remembered seeing a used tii motor for sale recently on Craigslist in CT for $500. Brian remembered seeing four injectors for sale on 2002faq. We agreed to follow up on both. I talked with the guy who had the motor, learned that he’d pulled it out of a car 10 years ago to install an M20 motor, and confirmed that the injection system was complete, including injectors. “What do you need to get for it?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “someone offered me $400 for it, so just beat that and it’s yours.” I PayPal’d him $420 while we were on the phone. I drove down to CT the next day and picked it up. Turned out he was a ‘CCA member back in the day, and was thrilled it was going to me.

I immediately pulled the four injectors from the spare motor. I also yanked all four from my own tii, as I wanted to get those cleaned and tested as well.

In parallel, Brian wound up buying the four injectors he’d seen on 2002faq. It took a while for him to receive them. Although they’d supposedly been cleaned and tested, with everything that had happened in fixing this car, I didn’t want to trust the testing of anything where I didn’t know the provenance firsthand.

Although it seemed like it was raining fuel injectors, I wanted belts and suspenders. I e-mailed Karel Jennings and said “you know that offer you made me to send me those old injectors? Well, funny story…”

Now, there are two schools of thought regarding having injectors cleaned and tested. One is that you need to send them to one of the five people who rebuilt Kugelfischer pumps. The other is that you can take them to any local shop that has experience with mechanical diesel or gas injectors, but you need to understand the dividing line between cleaning and testing versus rebuilding—that, if after cleaning, the injectors fail the test because they won’t open, or won’t close, or the spray pattern is bad, rebuilding them, if they’re rebuildable at all, is a specialized skill over and above cleaning and testing. I’d previously sent mine for testing to one of “the holy five,” but in truth I had no idea what had been done.

I decided to try the local diesel shop route. I found a shop in Boston who advertised that they cleaned and tested mechanical injectors. I spoke with the owner, but he said he only had the equipment to do diesel injectors. However, he said, his son had a shop in southern NH that worked with gas. I spoke with his son (Erik at Diesel’s Fuel Injection in Bow, NH) on the phone, described what I needed, and he understood completely. I sent him the three non-broken injectors from Brian’s car (labeled “known rusty”), the four from my tii (labeled “assumed good”), and the four from the spare motor (labeled “sitting for ten years, condition unknown”). Initially I thought I’d wait for Karel’s injectors to arrive and send all 15 together, but then decided, no, let’s get these 11 on their way. Plus, I thought that all Brian needed was one more good injector, and I’d just gotten four with the spare engine. What were the odds I’d need more than that, really?

In the meantime, I was doing nightly posts to Facebook and 2002faq about the status of the car. Brian posted “We’re taking it on tour! It’s the most famous poorly running tii in the country!” I retorted “Experience the full ride! For $20, hang with Rob and Brian in the parking lot of the Waffle House where it all began!”

In a week, I had the 11 injectors back. The cost for cleaning and testing all eleven was $150, which I thought was quite reasonable. The results were illuminating.

--My four were fine, which was reassuring.

--Of Brian’s three (I didn’t send the broken one), two were good, but the spray pattern on the third was bad. That meant he needed not one more, but two.

--Unfortunately, of the four from the spare engine, only one was good. The other three kept dripping. (Remember, this was cleaning and testing, with no attempts at rebuilding.)

Brian hadn’t received the four injectors he’d bought. So, incredibly, we were still short an injector. I got this news while I was at work. I immediately called Maire Anne and asked her to take the three injectors from Karel, which had arrived and were sitting in an envelope on the front porch, and send them to the injection shop. In the short term, I decided to loan Brian’s car one of my injectors. I was glad I’d just had mine cleaned and tested so we knew I wasn’t introducing another problem.

When I got home that evening, before installing the injectors, I made one more attempt to find Brian’s AWOL plunger. The battery in his car has several direct connections to it for a power amp and driving and fog lights (along with fuses and relays) that made me afraid to remove the battery for fear of yanking something out of the wiring. For this reason, I’d only searched on top of the front of the frame rail by feel for the plunger. 6^th time was the charm, though; I crawled under the car, reached up there, and laid my hands right on the spring. I found the plunger and clip a moment later. I inspected and cleaned the plunger, removed my spare head and its four plungers, and reunited Brian’s head and plungers, all shiny and clean, with their original pump.

I installed Brian’s three injectors and my loaner into his car. I bolted the intake plenums back up, checked the fuel connections, then tried to start the car. It took quite a while to start, and then ran rough, presumably because of the Vaseline in the plunger bores. But then seemed to settle down into a nice even idle. I was tempted to drive it and consummate my long-delayed eureka, but it was getting late, and rather than rush through it, I decided to wait until morning when I could be fresh and step through things carefully. In order to deal with the rusty gas issue, I had replaced every rubber fuel line in the car, and I still needed to trim some of the lines to the correct length.

The next morning, I trimmed and methodically double-checked the fuel connections. When the hour was polite enough to begin cranking a car, I fired it up. Again, it started hard, but then settled down. I got in, took a deep breath, backed it out of the driveway, and drove it down the street. I fed gas in second gear at about 2000 rpm, which was the repeatable zone for experiencing the problem.

And…

No difference. The problem remained. The car seemed to exhibit the same, or similar, lack of power until it came alive at higher rpm.

I think I turned white. I felt like someone had gut-punched me. I was clammy and sweating. My breath became short.

I pulled the car back into the garage, tried to breathe, and went upstairs for a cup of coffee. Either that or heroin. Maybe, I thought, addicts are misunderstood. Maybe they’re everyday people whose Kugelfischer systems have simply pushed them too far.

I tried to think. It kept coming back to one thing: It couldn’t be the Kugelfischer pump. I’d cleaned the head, didn’t find that it was obviously rust-contaminated, and convinced myself there was no way rusty fuel could get into the bottom end. And yet, from a diagnostic tree standpoint, it seemed that couldn’t be anything but the Kugelfischer pump.

I mentally prepared to swap injection pumps with my own tii.

No. Stop. People, myself included, have seen too many Sherlock Holmes episodes. You know, that whole “once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” thing. There’s another much simpler possibility: You got something wrong. Or you did something wrong. Both are far more likely than the bottom end of a KFish pump, much less a freshly rebuit KFish pump, being foobar’d.

I went back in the garage and re-engaged the car.

Only now it wouldn’t start.

Oh, right, I’d forgotten that I’d pulled the connector off the cold start valve (I’ll often do this on a tii I’m troubleshooting once it starts, just to prevent it from running too rich).

With the cold start valve hooked back up, the car started, but died a few seconds later. I tried again, and again it died.

Good! I thought. This is different!

I verified that it had spark. It would start and run when fuel was spraying through the cold start valve, but then die. Clearly this was a fuel delivery problem. So calm down, forget all the recent history, and troubleshoot it like any other tii. Either fuel isn’t getting into the injection pump, or it is but the injection pump isn’t turning, or it is but something in the pump is massively mucked. Or it’s something stupid.

Let’s start with the second one. For the third time, I pulled the cover off the injection belt and verified it hadn’t slipped or snapped. It was fine.

So… fuel pressure. I hooked the pressure gauge back up, cracked the key to fire up the fuel pump, and found that wasn’t 29 psi like it should be, but was back down to 24. Must be the fuel pump or pressure valve.

I swapped the pressure valve with the KFish pump on my car. No difference.

Okay, let’s nail this. I crawled under the car and listened to the new E28 fuel pump. It sounded a little funny, like occasionally there was a bee inside it. I yanked the pump and its bypassed expansion tank (if you recall, repeated blow-outs of the expansion tank kept generating a faint haze of fine rust, indicating it was likely rusty inside, so I bypassed it). I reinstalled the pump and non-bypassed expansion tank from my own car (which I’d had the good fortune not to put back into my car yet). The fuel pressure went up to 29 psi where it was supposed to be, but the car still wouldn’t stay running.

So what was I missing?

I looked at injection pump carefully. It was behaving as if it wasn’t pumping any fuel into the injectors. I began to pull out all four suction valves to verify I’d installed the original head correctly by checking that the plungers were going up and down. When I went to loosen the Allen key cap over the first suction valve, I found that the caps weren’t tight. Apparently I hadn’t snugged them down when I reinstalled them. So I did now.

I also noticed a very small amount of fuel was weeping out of the threads of the delivery valve of #4 injection line. I tightened it.

The car immediately started and stayed running. I let it idle in the garage for 10 minutes until it was fully warmed up.

It then did the warm idle hunting (oscillating engine rpm) that tiis often do. I opened up the tuna can at the top of the intake manifold and backed out the tiny mixture screw 1/16 of a turn to richen the mixture. The idle hunting went away.

I got into the car, backed it out of the driveway, drove it down the street, punched the throttle in second gear at 2000 rpm, and held my breath.

The problem appeared to be gone.

I grinned.

I continued around the corner onto a larger street, and, ahem, drove it like I stole it. It revved joyously up toward red line.

A huge Cheshire cat smile broke over my face. I’d say “a shit-eating grin,” but, really, I’ve never understood that analogy.

I came back home, checked for leaks, found none, then took it up onto the highway. Even dropping it into 3^rd at 65, running it up to five grand, and driving 80, it just purred. (These runs can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEz1QoGt4zg.)

The problem really was gone.

I sent Brian a text with a single word, pregnant with meaning: Eureka!

Now I just needed to untangle the cluster of fixes I’d rapidly tried. I removed my pressure valve and put back Brian’s. Fuel pressure was still at 29, so his pressure valve was okay.

I took out my fuel pump and expansion tank and was about to reinstall Brian’s fuel pump with the expansion tank bypassed, but then I remembered the buzzing noise I’d heard. I tapped his fuel pump on a paper towel. I was surprised and less than thrilled to see some particulate matter come out. It wasn’t anywhere close to the rust mounds from the original fuel pump, but there shouldn’t have been anything. I theorized that the only part of the fuel system I hadn’t blown out with compressed air (simply because I forgot) was the fuel pickup tube itself, the part that sits inside the gas tank. Perhaps some sediment from there had gotten into the fuel pump before I’d installed the additional fuel filter between the tank and the pump, and the buzzing was the pump impeller hitting the sediment. I put the pump back in. It seemed quieter than before; I wasn’t hearing the buzzing.

Unfortunately, with Brian’s new E28 pump back in and his expansion tank still bypassed, the fuel pressure was back down to 24 psi, but despite the low fuel pressure, the car drove perfectly fine. Was it his pump or the presence of the expansion tank?  I then unbypassed the expansion tank. The fuel pressure rose from 24 to 26 psi. Still not at 29, but better. And, still, the car continued to run fine.

That evening, while it was all still fresh in my mind, I wrote Brian a lengthy e-mail reminding him that both his long metal fuel line and his expansion tank appeared to be shedding a small amount of powdery rust that should be caught by the fuel filters, but if he wanted it gone beyond the shadow of a doubt, he’d need to replace these components or pay someone to do so. And, to quote Samuel Clemens in the Star Trek Next Generation “Time’s Arrow” episode, “this increasingly hypothetical someone… would not be me.”

And then I stopped. Sometimes you need to take a step back in order to realize that you’ve completed something. I’d fixed the problem. I didn’t need to fix every problem that a 42 year old car might have.

The car had died taking Brian and his wife Michelle to The Vintage. I’d tried to fix it in a parking lot in Northern Virginia, and not only couldn’t, I couldn’t even isolate the problem. I’d failed. But that failure kicked off an extraordinary series of events. What started as an offhand comment to Brian in the parking lot (“You’ll write about this, right?” “Well, I would, but it’s the wrong ending to the story.”) morphed into an obsession. I had the power to change the ending. I just needed to do something absolutely insane and ridiculously time-consuming. Fortunately, I have long stretches where my mental state may legitimately be questioned, and time appears to still be on my side.

I had rewritten the ending to the story.

……………………

So… the mysteries:

·        Was the fuel tank ever cleaned? I think so.

·        Did the rust contamination originate with crud that was left in the gas tank, or did the car get a tank of contaminated gas? Don’t know.

·        How could the rust contamination get past the main fuel filter? Was it ripped? Don’t know.

·        Is the “black stuff” that Brian said came out of the original fuel filter the same as the “rubbery black stuff” I found in the gas tank? And where did it come from? Don’t know.

·        Did the same thing that got past the main fuel filter (assuming something did) actually rip a gash in the screen in the injection pump, or did the pump rebuilder install a gashed screen? I think the latter possibility is more likely.

·        Did the brass shards of the ripped screen muck anything up? I didn’t filter the gas and separate the crud into different sized particles. There was so much rust, scale, and particulate matter in the system that any thin brass screen fragments were almost certainly in the noise. I’d give this one a probably not.

·        Was the rust found in the injectors actually from the rusty gas, or was it unrelated? Don’t know. There are many posts on 2002faq about tii injectors getting rusty from gas just sitting in them for long periods of time. I think it’s highly likely this is what caused three of the four injectors in the spare engine to go bad.

·        Did rust and moisture cause #4 injector to break, or was that completely unrelated? Don’t know.

·        Did the Kugelfischer expert actually rebuild the injection pump? I think so.

·        Did the Kugelfischer expert actually test the injectors? Don’t know.

·        Did the Kugelfischer expert actually clean the injectors? Could all that rust have gotten in there after he cleaned and tested them? Don’t know.

·        Which of the things at the end were the cause of the car’s not running? Was it the loose suction valve caps or the small amount of weeping fuel? Don’t know. I could smell the finish line. I didn’t try to recreate the last failure to tease this one out.

·        Why did the fuel pressure never come all the way up to 29 psi? Is the new E28 fuel pump not up to snuff? Don’t know. I’ve left this one to Brian. If he wants to return the pump, I have the receipt. The car runs fine with the pump putting out 26 psi and the expansion tank in the circuit.

Man, that’s a lot I don’t know.

Alfred Hitchcock has a wonderful term: The MacGuffin. It’s the plot device that sets a chain of events in motion. Often, it’s a mysterious object. The Maltese Falcon (the bird statue in the movie of the same name) is the classic MacGuffin. The thing is, by the end of the film, the MacGuffin evaporates. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, George R.R. Martin is a master of this. Who killed John Aryn? Who tried to have Bran murdered? Who offed Joffrey? Those were all big things that set events—even wars—into motion, yet some of them were never resolved, or if they were, by that time, it hardly mattered.

Why am I on about this? Because questions like the cause of the rust in the gas of Brian’s car and how much work was or was not performed by certain shops were MacGuffen-like. And, in the end, answering the questions mattered far less than simple thorough cleaning. In other words, “what” mattered far more than “why.”

Folks have asked me how much time it took. Initially I kept a log, then stopped, since… what was the point? I can estimate, though. Counting driving down to CT to buy the spare tii motor (which produced only one spare injector, but whose usefulness to me will hopefully play out in time), it was three full weekends and two weeks of evenings. Let’s say 3x16 + 10x3 = 48 + 30 = 78 hours. If you take 75% of that as actual on-car time, that probably puts it in the ball park.

And now, the big question: Why did I do it?

There is an entire chapter in my book devoted to the wiles of wrenching, the sensation of holding tools, the joy of being completely engaged with the repair process, the exercise of my right brain, the giving of one’s undivided attention to one problem at a time. In a world where I can’t slow global warming, fix the Greek debt crisis, or get Donald Trump to shut up, I can replace a water pump and fix a problem from start to finish, for good.

But, you know what? Despite my efforts to pare down, I still own eleven cars, and all but one need constant work. So I don’t have a shortage of wellsprings for Hack Mechanic Zen. I certainly didn’t take on Brian’s project just to have something to do.

Of course, there’s the diagnostic angle. Brian’s car was a puzzle. The puzzle was fun. The puzzle completely occupied me for three weeks. But is that why I did it?

Partially.

Would I have done it had I known how much work it was going to be?

Probably not. 

But if I knew that, I would’ve known what the problem was. Sorry. If you’re going to play “what if,” you can only alter one reality at a time.

Look. We are complex entities. We do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. In the end, this was not unlike my replacing the engine in my friend Alex’s piece of crap Passat wagon. It was what needed to be done to help out another human being. Alex is, in many ways, my closest male friend, and he was flat broke at the time. In contrast, I’ve only had three hours of face time with Brian in a hot parking lot. But we connect with the people we connect with. I liked Brian. I liked his wife. I liked the way they treated each other. I felt for him and the personal inescapable Kugelfischer-related hell he felt he was in trapped in, never being able to fully solve the problem with the car. I was in a position to help him. So why not help him? Did it really need to be more complicated than that?

In the end, really, I have no better answer than this one. I only wish I looked as good in a white muscle shirt, suspenders, and a brown fedora.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFS4jtW0BA

(Next week: The Hack Mechanic finds something more productive to do with his time. Maybe installing that spare tii engine in the Lotus Europa. Too bad it needs fuel injectors.) –Rob Siegel

(Epilogue: The fuel injection shop just called me with the news about the three injectors Karel sent me. They’re empty. They’re upper and lower housings that have no injector cores in them. Karel and I had a good laugh. “I’ve had them in a box in the basement for ten years thinking they were worth something,” he said. So, in finding usable injectors, I’m one for seven. Brian is Fedexing me the four he bought. Hopefully his success rate will be better.)

Got a question for Rob Siegel, the Hack Mechanic? You can find him in the BMW CCA Forums here!

Rob’s book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic is available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get a personally inscribed copy through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.

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