1974 914 No crank no fuel pump

[wanabe911 owner]

Help, My 1974 Porsche 914 wont crank, fuel pump wont come on when I turn the key. Background. I have been doing some work to my car in the garage for a few months. Started replacing my carper, so I removed the seats and all the old carpet and found the relay under the passenger seat, left it alone. Had my battery disconnected and on a trickle charger. Now that I have everything back in, I wanted to take her out for a spin and nothing. My car is carbonated and usually when I turn the key I hear the fuel pump prime and then turn the key the rest of the way to start the car, but no click, no prime. There is power, hazards work, interior light works, city lights come on. I cant see where I disconnected anything on the big or small relay under the passenger seat, I removed the seat to be sure. Note I also replaced the negative battery cable with a new one that was way shorter than the super long one that was installed in the car. I checked with my multimeter across the terminals and the cables and I get 12.6 volts.

[Dave at Pelican Parts]

Time to start troubleshooting.

Make sure your ground points actually connect to the battery ground. Since you replaced the ground cable, that's something to double check as well. It needs a good clean connection at both ends of the cable--the battery end and the chassis end.

Make sure that you have power where you're supposed to have unswitched power. And when you turn the key on, check stuff that is supposed to have switched power to make sure it has it.

--DD

[wanabe911 owner]

Thank you Dave


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[wanabe911 owner]

I am going to start on that negative cable and work my way from there. I will report back.

[Brookshire my]

Have you checked the fuses?

[wanabe911 owner]

Checked the fuses and they are good.

Removed the negative battery cable, cleaned where it bolts to the chassis with a wire brush. Cleaned up the battery real good and guess what happed when I turned the key? She’s ALIVE!

Guess I should have started there first instead of taking the passenger side of the interior apart!


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[Tobra]

Always start simple

[wanabe911 owner]

Always good advice!


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[Dave at Pelican Parts]

More good advice: Double-check the last thing you did to the car before it started having the problem. More often than we would like to admit, we caused the problem trying to fix something else.

I am *NOT* mentioning accidentally unplugging the CHT sensor when checking something else in the area. And taking a full day to figure it out. NOPE NOPE NOPE, you never heard it from me!

--DD

[wanabe911 owner]

lol


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[Brookshire my]

Many years ago I took one of my older cars for a test ride down a local country road after a lot of parts replacement. About 3 miles from home it just flat stopped. Within a minute I had all my spare parts and meters out and was under the hood initially checking for loose wires when the 10 year old kid mowing the yard near the road walked over. He immediately said, “Dad always told me to check the gas tank first.” He had a one gallon gas can with him. You know the rest of this embarrassing story!

[wanabe911 owner]

That is awesome


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[Tobra]

Gas gauge did not work right in my first car, would not go below 1/4 tank. Filled it up and wrote down the mileage after that.

[wanabe911 owner]

I daily drove a flood car back in the 90’s that I guestimated how many MPG’s and knowing more or less how much fuel it would take would fill it up every 225 miles or so.

Fixed it after my wife started driving it


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