[DeTomaso] The latest adventures in the garage

Christopher Kimball chrisvkimball at msn.com
Sat May 5 20:34:12 EDT 2007


Yesterday and today I put all the emails y'all have sent me to good use.  I 
hooked up the tachometer wire, unhooked the alternator so I could run the 
last 10 minutes of the cam break in without worrying about if the 
alternator's regulator is working or not (I'll check that tomorrow), hooked 
up almost all the cruise control, cleaned the ammeter contacts, and tested 
the water temperature sending unit.

Interesting thing about the sending unit--I touched the wire to ground as 
suggested and the needle did go to the right, which was good news, but when 
I tried my ingenious method of testing the thing by pouring boiling water 
into the coolant bottle (after siphoning out it's coolant first) the 
temperature gauge didn't move.  Doh!

I went to bed frustrated about that because I didn't want to run the car at 
all without a working temp gauge.  Then, in the middle of the night it hit 
me--I had repainted the coolant bottle and lined the inside of its holding 
bracket so the new paint wouldn't get scratched.  I suddenly realized by 
doing that, I had probably eliminated any ground the bottle may have had, 
which would be necessary for the sending unit to work.  Sure enough, when I 
tested it with an ohm meter it didn't register 0, but something in between 0 
and infinity, so I knew that was the problem.  I hooked a
ground wire to the sending unit on the bottle and ran it to a good ground 
then tried my boiling water experiment again, and this time the needle 
registered just fine!

Buoyed by my success I decided it was time to run the last 10m minutes of 
cam break in, so I burped the cooling system one more time and started her 
up.  Things were great--the tachometer now works, the water temperature 
gauge works and the Dakota Digital fan relays worked too!

After about 5 minutes I discovered a loose wire I had forgotten to tie up 
was hanging close to the header on the passenger side and was beginning to 
smoke and melt.  Worse, one of the air conditioning hoses was also close to 
the same header and looked as if it were getting very hot, too.  I had to 
shut down the car and solve those problems (I used a heavy-duty wire tie to 
pull the air conditioning hose away from the header and then covered in with 
heat-resistant sticky-backed foil for good measure).

I restarted the car and ran it for another almost 10 minutes without 
incident.

The Pantera Owners Club may make a mechanic out of me yet!

Tomorrow I'm going to reconnect the alternator and see if it works now that 
I've hooked up all the loads to the alternator side of the ammeter instead 
of the battery side.

I also have to figure out how to get the "gen" light to work with my one 
wire system.

Thanks again for your help, everyone!

Sincerely,

Chris





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