stranded once again

[drtidmore]

Well, I was pretty certain that I had found the culprit that caused my Reatta to strand me on the highway a couple of weeks ago.  I was deluded into that belief when I found little to no fuel pressure at the initial crank priming and once I swapped in one of the other firewall relays, the pressure popped right up.  I wrote off the fact that the engine should not have died while running (i.e. oil sender backup circuit) due to the sender being factory original and had been giving some erratic high readings, so I just suspected that it had failed as well.  Replace all the relays and the oil sender.  New sender now gives consistent, in range, readings and I pulled the fuel pump relay to verify that it was working properly.  Thought I was golden once again.

 

Then the Reatta pulled the same engine stalling, no fuel pressure again just the other day.  I had noticed that the fuel pump whine was getting louder than typical just before the loss of engine power.  After it sat for an hour or so, I still had NO fuel pressure at first, but then out of the blue, it popped up to 40 psi, so now I knew that the real issue was the fuel pump. FYI, I had about 3/4 tank of gas in the car so the pump was fully immersed.   As the fuel pump that was in the tank (replaced it about 3 years ago) was at least working for the moment, I used it to pump out the fuel in the tank into 5 gallon gas containers and pulled then pulled the tank.  I had made the mistake 3 years ago of not doing sufficient research on the forum and missed that glowing reviews of the Bosch Turbine pump and so I installed a typical FLAPS part (but it did come with a lifetime warranty).  Regardless of the warranty, this time I ordered up the Bosch 69222 turbine pump and installed it.  

 

TOTALLY silent operation.  I did not reinstall the pulsator device as the Bosch is known for its silky smooth output.  Once I had the bubbles out of the fuel lines, the Bosch is delivering pressure that is rock steady whereas the old one had some jitter even with the pulsator.  

 

[Ronnie]

17 minutes ago, 89RedDarkGrey said:

Compare the OEM pump to a Wankel rotary engine- as opposed to the "Turbine" pump being simple linear movement, with one moving part, smooth, quiet, no vibration. Our engine's oil pump is a gerotor. Although a rotary engine is very smooth- that is because it is being operated differently internally. The rotor is being turned not the engine itself.

 

It seems to be similar in operation of how the dilithium crystals are circulated through the turbo encabulator - with the exception of the vane type cooling pump on the encabulator is in a fixed position and the encabulator spins around it. You have to really keep the muffler bearings in good condition to prevent wearing out the exhaust pipes. If they had designed it with a turbine type of pump they could have eliminated the muffler bearings. I guess the reason they didn't was because they couldn't find a turbine type pump with linear movement that would fit.