With a little help …

This is the story of a car-related problem and how I solved it. I’m telling it because it might ring true with you, the reader. You undoubtedly have had some minor thing go wrong with your vehicle, then suffered as you tried to make it right. I think, in other words, that you’ll know where I’m coming from.

The car is a Volvo 122S that I’ve owned for at least 10 years. Lovers of this particular model write hosannas to its steadfastness and incorruptibility, but I’m writing here about the one time it failed me.

I put the 122S away for the winters, and have developed a ritual over the last few years. The car wouldn’t start until I unbolted the mechanical fuel pump from the engine block and pumped it by hand, after which the Volvo would run fine for the entire season.

The procedure failed this year. My first thought was that I was out of gas, so I borrowed some from the lawnmower’s jerry can. Still nothing, and now the battery was dead. A few days went by until I borrowed some jumper cables from a coworker.

I decided the fuel pump was faulty. I scoured the Internet for this now-archaic item, and finally found one for about $40. It took a week to arrive, and looked slightly different from the original, but it fit into place easily. But after I’d hooked up the cables to my neighboring Dodge Dart, it still wouldn’t start.

OK, I’m mad now. I go back online and find some Volvo forums. I post my problem on at least two of them, and also e-mail a well-known Volvo guru in Sweden. The near-unanimous conclusion is that my fuel line is blocked somehow. I am instructed to a) remove the fuel tank and check the connection there or b) simply blow out the line with compressed air. Fine, but I don’t have a compressor, and I don’t have time to pull the tank.

A couple of months go by with no action, but then Lance, my mother’s boy-friend and a very handy guy, mentions that he has a tank of compressed air. I borrow that, hook it up, and lo and behold I hear the fuel bubbling in the tank. Any blockage that might have been there is gone now, but it still won’t start. Grrrr.

A mechanic friend, Rob Maier, tells me that the problem could be a porous hose connection from the fuel pump to the fuel line. He gives me some new fuel line, and I install it (hooking up the jumper cables again, etc.) but it still won’t start. I next decide with little evidence that the fuel filter is the problem, and I have a Eureka! moment when I discover the old one was in upside down. But a new filter doesn’t help.

I’ve now replaced nearly the entire fuel system, and am thinking of having a go at pulling the tank. Probably a dirty, all-day, tools-all-over-the-driveway kind of job. But then my friend Peter comes to call. Peter is an American engineer living in Sweden, where he works on trains. He can fix anything and, better yet, once owned old Volvos. Within minutes (after noting that I’d installed the pump gasket upside down), Peter disconnects the fuel line to the twin carburetors and sucks on it. Immediately fuel begins to flow.

Reconnected, the car starts immediately. I feel like an idiot.

Many of you already know what happened here. The rubber diaphragm on the old pump was worn out, allowing the fuel to flow back into the tank when the car was idle. Replacing the fuel pump was the right decision, but I never primed the new pump – and you can’t pump air. I learned my lesson, but boy, it cost me time and aggravation. Know the feeling?