Fuel Pump Question
Thread Starter
Staging Lane
Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 90
Likes: 0
From: Phoenix
Fuel Pump Question I have a 98 LS1 in my sandrail. I took it out one last weekend before its too hot, and I seem to be having fuel starvation problems where the car looses power when you have your foot into it.
The car has run about 2 hours so far on a new Walbro 255 L/hr pump with a new aluminum gas tank and a prefilter on the suction side of the pump. The pump is mounted level with the bottom of the gas tank and uses a Corvette fuel pressure regulator.
After the first hour of running the pump started to make noise, so I pulled the suction filter and replaced it. Power came back for a little while and the pump quieted down. It started to get noisy again and power fell off. I limped back to camp and I pulled the discharge line from the pump to empty the tank into a gas can and it took like 40 minutes to drain out about 6 gallons of fuel.
I called the guy I bought the pump from and the first thing he asked was if I wired the pump relay to the ignition switch or let the computer turn it on. I told him that I turned on the fuel with a seperate manual switch. He told me that this 'deadheads' the pump and that was the source of the failure and invited me to buy another one for $150. I didn't think the pump could ever be deadheaded and that even if the engine was running or not, the bypass on the Corvette regulator keeps the fuel rail pressurized at a constant psi.
Did I miss something here? Should the pump always be energized by the computer?
The car has run about 2 hours so far on a new Walbro 255 L/hr pump with a new aluminum gas tank and a prefilter on the suction side of the pump. The pump is mounted level with the bottom of the gas tank and uses a Corvette fuel pressure regulator.
After the first hour of running the pump started to make noise, so I pulled the suction filter and replaced it. Power came back for a little while and the pump quieted down. It started to get noisy again and power fell off. I limped back to camp and I pulled the discharge line from the pump to empty the tank into a gas can and it took like 40 minutes to drain out about 6 gallons of fuel.
I called the guy I bought the pump from and the first thing he asked was if I wired the pump relay to the ignition switch or let the computer turn it on. I told him that I turned on the fuel with a seperate manual switch. He told me that this 'deadheads' the pump and that was the source of the failure and invited me to buy another one for $150. I didn't think the pump could ever be deadheaded and that even if the engine was running or not, the bypass on the Corvette regulator keeps the fuel rail pressurized at a constant psi.
Did I miss something here? Should the pump always be energized by the computer?
