I hope everyone is having a great new year! I have a 2001 3.8L firebird and I just replaced my fuel pump with a walbro 255 by using the trap door mod. The problem is getting the pump to turn on when trying to start the car.

It seems like if I play with wires a little that plug into the top of the fuel pump holder it will prime, but sometimes it wont. Is there a way to check the wires that connect to the pump without dropping the tank? or could there be a possible shotage in the plug itself?

I'm going out on a limb to say that the pump is good. When it does prime and the car is running it drives and idles smoothly. Also this is my second attempt to replace the pump. The first one was an ebay pump that crapped out the first day so I'm hoping I wouldn't have two bad pumps in a row.

 

Jack up and safely block the back of the car. Slide under on your back and look waaaay up in the cavity area in front of the gas tank. See if you don't see a junction plug clipped to the body. It may be a pita to get to with the exhaust and crap in the way. Could be there might be corrosion in the plug, and fiddling with the wires are giving you a connection again. (remember, I said could and might )

 

Alright thanks I will give that a try. Now the pump doesnt respond at all when I wiggle the wires.

 

I tried cleaning out the plug under the gas tank and still no joy. (I did find that my muffler was loose while under the car so thats one thing fixed)

I'm not very good at wiring so I'm going to pull the pump back out and see if a wire I adapted came loose or something.

Also this may be a dumb question but could fuel getting on the wires in the fuel pump assembly screw up anything?

 

How did you "adapt" the wire? Please don't say you twisted and taped it! If you spliced a wire, I wouldn't have done anything short of soldering and sealing it with shrink tubing.

 

Unfortunately I did twist it , but I knew I would have to go back and solder it. Turns out thats what the problem was. I thought I went back and made a good connection to test it, but when I pluged up the pump to the car to test I accidently crossed the wires so that made me think it was something else causing the problem.

How would I go about sealing the wires with shrink tubing?

Thanks for all the help.

 

Heat Shrink Tubing: http://www.google.com/products/catal...988&sa=title#p You can pick it up at Radio Shack, or a hardware store in the electrical section.
Use a diameter that's a little larger than the wire, based on the thickness of where you're joining the two wires together. Cut a length of the tubing so that it's long enough to cover the outer casing of both ends of the wires, and slide it onto one of the wires. You're going to be making an in-line splice. Get the strands of the open wires as straight as you can, cover both well with soldering flux, and join the two ends of the wires together by sliding both towards each other. I like to do it that way as opposed to just laying the wires over each other as it intertwines the strands and holds it together better for soldering. Make sure the wires are squished together well and there are no strands hanging out, then solder away. But, before you solder it, make sure the shrink tubing is going to fit over the lump with a little more room for the solder. After soldering, slide the tubing over to cover both sides of the wires casing, and heat it with a lighter going around the tube, and it will shrink and hug the wire. You want to use heat, not direct flame, or you could melt it.

 

Thanks camaro 69 for all the advice. I did what you said and it worked like a charm! Of course now that the pump is working my starter decided to fail. I guess from all the cranking I was doing trying to test the pump.

 

You're welcome. And that figures, Murphy's law I guess.