George's Blog For Friends

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Fuel Pump Relay

Lately or maybe for a long time i had problems with my fuel pump relay, a really strange problem, i had different voltages on the coil circuit, every time i was measuring. Recently, at times it wasn't starting at all. Sometimes probably it was flickering on the pump circuit while driving. This might explain the sudden decrease in fuel economy after 2004 when i came back from Romania. I went to all of the mechanics i knew and they all told me: Just drive the damn car, George! It will cost you more to fix it than the difference you pay for the extra gas!

But now it started not to start any more. After taking apart in one whole day most of the connectors of the electric circuits, i figured the problem comes directly from the computer, and i understood now why it does not stop the fuel pump after 2 seconds. Then i connected the relay coil directly to the ignition bypassing the computer and voilà! fixed the problem. I still don't have fuel pump interruption after two seconds but who cares. I didn't have that since i bought it. Another interesting phenomenon though: After i did the above described short cut, the computer suddenly started to output the right voltage for the relay when measured without the modification! And that happened while i was near the car, nobody had access to it, from one minute to another, the only explanation could be someone has control over it from a distance.

Since the relay if it was flickering on the pump circuit because of the low voltage probably was flickering at higher rpms when vibration was present, and now DEQ only tests the cars at idle and for my year and type, 1998 Chevy S10, it not even tests it any more, just downloads the diagnostic data from the computer. I think those big dynos from the basement of DEQ testing floor from the good old days had their own good use.

In The Army

1987. IMU Bacău, now World Machinery Works LOL. I went to a 10 hour video maraton, "videourile", for wich i paid i can't remember, what, it was 70 lei divided by five families? In somebody's apartment. In one of the breaks between movies they played a version of the song In The Army Now with British band Status Quo, the one with running soldiers. I was familiar somehow with the band since i was myself in a band that did our own cover of Hot Dogs, from Cătălin's memory, with mumbled words :D, when i was in the first second year in college. Recently i heard the real song. Kinda rock and roll country.

I got really obsessed with In The Army Now after seeing that video, i think it was one of the first music videos i ever seen don't know why or maybe i got an idea now, i think i should write about. It was probably the smoke coming from the bathroom pipes enclosure, because my downstairs neighbour was smoking, at least for the recognizable part, cigarettes, and then i was getting euphoric, and i used to think by some magic property gained by doing "yoga" in high school. Pretty much like here before it stopped today @8PM at least for now after i threw some water in the gutters. I recorded the song at the "Recording studio" at the street front of Bacău performing theatre building, they just "happened" to have the album, on one cassette all over on both sides so i can play it continuously. Since i had this Russian cassette player at work for our Sinclair cloned computers with which we were pioneering at IMU in Computer Aided Design, i was playing that song continuously, for what, a month or two? Now i remembered what broke that cycle, but i will rather not say. My colleagues were bending their noses of course but didn't stop me. That's when i made my first gears optimizing program in Sinclair Basic, the one that got a very bad review in a big meeting from the production chief engineer conf.dr.ing.Bontaş. That program would have been ok even by today's standards.

And all this happened before we got our PDP-11 clone. Then i made another version of that program, in the BASIC that came with the RSX-11 operating system. And many other programs in Fortran77 and even Macro assembler (i learned Macro from the course notes and questions towards my ex-colleague and subordinate that spent 3 months in Bucharest at ICI or CC-MIEt (now i have some doubts)) until 89 when i switched to accounting and payroll in different programming languages like Fortran77, dBase and FOXBASE.

I had no idea why the word Quo was in there in the band's name. Maybe it was just subliminal. Maybe the're all gay (Watch the gesture with the guitar at the beginning of this live version). I don't care i just went crazy for the song, that's all.

It was all subconscious. Any wise ass can tell me why? Cause now i know...

By the way i still like the song...