joined the embarassing breakdown club

well after developing a misfire under load today, decided it was a fuelling problem, pulled fuel pump off and had loads of rusty gooey stuff on the low pressure side, so cleaned it out.

car went fine after that, or so I thought, until I was pulling out of the tesco express petrol station - just died.

pushed it back into a parking space and set about pulling pump off again, with hundreds of people walking past and sniggering - could just see them saying what the missus says in their heads - "I told you that lump of scrap would break down!"

think pump is jammed up internally - you can feel it trying to pump, but theres no fuel pumping - so got towed back home - and now have a nice little job to do whilst watching my 2yr old tommorrow

damm.

oh well ive now joined the proper mk1 club!!

i joined it a few weeks back. fuel pump relay had gone. looked so sorry for itself on a truck

been fine since though

thankfully for me, relay is brand new so still clicks fine, not so good however is the pump is brand new as well - if its jiggered I wont be a happy bunny!

check your tank is clean before you fit a new pump.

^^^ LOL - its now 4.30am just got  back from work and am about to set about cleaning my tank out before my daughter wakes up! its got about half an inch of slimy crud in the bottom of the swirl pot - yipee.

dont feel bad. i was heading out for a charity cruise in my bucket-o-crap caddy and as i was parking, the new shifter i had installed 3 days earlier, fell through the floor! needless to say i didn't have my spare shifter or the tools to fix it on site. so i limped it home just to find my passats timing chains rattle at anything above 2500 RPM. what fun. i missed the cruise AND had to fix my caddy again.

also about a year ago or so i was test driving the wifes cabby after i got the wiring sorted out. fuel pump relay died and i had to be towed home by the family jeep. how embarrassing. especially since i had 5 cars behind me and my wife was 1\2 mile away at home.

well thats it finally done - 2.5hours in a carpark, in the semi dark, and its SPITTING!

got loads of rubbish out, but to make sure il pop downto my local friendly german who runs a carb shop to get an inline filter for it too.

typical - just sell me daily fiat bucket to run the golf full time, and it packs up leaving me with no car!!

thats not even remotly embarasing. many years ago (about 20!) i had my first mk1 gti, not had it long and on a date with a new girlfriend of mine we were driving home, been a good night on the way back to hers :wink:  :wink:  :wink: , all of a sudden all the headlights go out, panic, manage to limp to petrol station, quick check and find previous owners attempt at uprating the headlamps, feed to relays had two  :dontknow: in line fuses and one had blown, shes now getting restless need to fix it no tools. brainwave run into shop buy a kit kat use silver foil in holder (i know i knowbut i said i was young and probably desprate!) job done on way all good in the world.

fast forward 6 months and someone in work has organised a night navigational rally, sounds like fun, so there i was driving through some of the darkest roads in wales when, the lights went out again. it was at this point that i remembered i was going to get around to fixing the tempory repair i did 6 months earlier. managed to crawl on side lights and navigator hanging out of window with torch to the next checkpoint. now what i was hoping to do was quielty fix the fault and no one would be none the wiser but driving along with no lights and someone hanging out the window drew a bit of a crowd.
now this would be quite bad as i had a feeling as to what the fault was but what made it worse was i was working for the raf as and electrician at the time and all 10 people who dived under the bonnet to help were electricians, fault was immediatly traced to "some idiot has replaced a fuse with tinfoil"that would be me then. i never did quite live that one down.
i have since left the raf and work as …………………………..AN AUTO ELECTRICIAN!"     but would never do anything so stupid again, well maybe if it was a genuine emergency like last time :wink:  :wink: