As posted before, when the starter on the Biturbo stopped working I looked in the service manual and there was no documentation. The solution that finally worked was to wiggle the starter before I tightened the bolts. After I had the Biturbo engine running again, I decided to install an air/fuel gauge.
While I was sitting in the car all of the electrics suddenly died, the fuel pump, the lights, the dash, everything!
First I checked the fuses but after replacing a few that were missing the problem persisted. The next thing I did was to find the electric section of the service manual and the only thing in there is a child's drawing of the electrical system with every wire drawn with the brown crayon, where as they hired a professional artist to do 30 pictures of the cylinder head.
The Maserati Biturbo has a design flaw in the connectors on the printed circuit board inside the fuse box. So I removed the fuse box and Jim and I spent half a day trying to understand the internals of it. After hours of connectivity tests it appeared that everything was working fine. So we put it back in, connected everything up and the gauges still weren't working. After playing with the connectors pulling them out, putting them back, and wiggling some around, everything started working again.
Back again
15 years ago
Nice work. I made a tactical edit or two to your post, just to improve the flow a bit.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the continuity testing wont show the problem as there was SOME amount of electrical connection since we were seeing 2.5V even when things were 'broken'. Thus, some amount of electricty was making it through. Anyhow, if wiggling can cause it to 'fix', can wiggling cause it to fail again? And will that potentially leave you on the roadside?
probably, I think I'll begin work on an automatic wiggler, it will get triggered when the voltage to the gauges drops then it will begin to wiggle and fix the problem. This seems much more likely to be successful then actually finding and fixing the problem.
ReplyDelete