Firing up the beast...

...or not.

In preparation in trying to get the old girl started the old fuel was drained from the system (25 litres of foul smelling old petrol), some fresh stuff put in, belts checked for wear, spark plugs removed to make sure there's nothing resting in the cylinders that will mess things up when turned over and a quick check over to make sure everything was connected.

After all the prep I jumped in the car and turned the key........*click*............not quite the exciting response I was after. Turned out the starter motor solenoid had given up (hardly surprising) so a freshly rebuilt one was obtained and fitted. Jumped back in and turned the key........*click*.......again hardly exciting stuff. After a bit of research I managed to jump the starter motor as there was an issue somewhere (which later turned out to be a dead immobiliser) and the engine turned over spitting any rubbish out of the spark plug ports.

With the plugs back in the key was turned again and the starter wire bridged and the engine turned over and over......and over.......and over.............and over. Managed to trace the fault down to a dead fuel pump this time, the list of faults just grows and grows!

A while after this I managed to open up the fuel pump and removed the tiniest pieces of debris that had caused the pump mechanism to completely seize and the engine fired up. There was quite a lot of smoke and it was pretty lumpy but that was to be expected after such a long layup. After running for a while longer the smoke started to die down a bit (although not completely) and the running improved as the injectors started to ease up a bit. the engine is now running pretty well but could still use some new ignition leads to replace the ancient cracked original items.