I picked up the car from Ken the interior guy (great work as usual) and began working away at the couple of small but pesky bugs still left in the car. I had sent out the Tach and Speedo to MoMa in Albuquerque for a rebuild. The tach had worked but hung up after 3K. The Speedo worked but the tripometer did not. MoMa did a perfect rebuild job. In fact they changed the guts on the tach to a modem set up so it will work if the next owner changes from points to an electronic ignition. The tach and speedo went back in with some effort as there is absolutely no room to work under the dash. I had to run a new wire back to the coil as the new tach set-up called for a straight wire instead of one in a series loop.
Since I had gotten this project Europa three years ago, I had been looking and looking on ebay for a couple missing items. I got them all except for one side badge and bezel that goes in the back along the side of the car. For our 25th wedding anniversary, my son Mike and his wife got me a $100 gift certificate to Dave Bean. They also got a gift certificate for Sue to some Foo-foo type store. It will take Sue six months to get around spending that certificate. I was on the phone the next day spending all $100 of mine. They even gave me a little discount so that the badge, bezel, tax and delivery were exactly $100. Nice! Glued it on with clear silicone; hope it doesn't fall off!
On to the remaining bugs. One of the electrical glitches really had me going. Both the fuel gauge and the water temp gauge did not work. In reading up on things in the Europa Knowledgebase on the web, I found that the usual suspect was the voltage stabilizer. It was actually not too bad to get at under the dash on the passenger side so I pulled it out for access. This issue had me scratching my head as it was supposed to read 12 volts in and 10 volts out (the regulator, not my head). What I got was 12 volts in and a pulsing voltage out. What the heck? Am I hooked up to the turn signals? Further review of all the comments regarding voltage stabilizers on the web, I found that this was Lucas normal. There is normal and then there is Lucas normal. The Lucas voltage stabilizer is actually more of a voltage averager. It pulses between 12 and 6 volts with the gauges responding slow enough that it averaged at 10 volts. Whatever - it's Lucas technology. This meant that mine was OK, so I had to find out what else the problem could be. I took off the water temp lead and grounded it. I stuck my head in the cockpit to have a look as this should have made the water gauge peg but it didn't move. I scratched my head, mumbled a few things, and as I was exiting the cockpit I noticed that the fuel gauge was pegged - Hmmmmmmmm! Seems that there was a wire reversed somewhere in the harness under the dash. Right where it was impossible to get at. So I reversed the wires back in the engine bay. That made it so the temp gauge now worked. After much more diagnosis and running of extra ground leads, I determined that alas, the gas sending unit was kaput. And since the gauge was basically swinging inside the tank, I decided that the next owner could just fill up every 250 miles and reset the tripometer instead of me jacking up the car 4 feet, draining the tank and dropping the left tank for easy access.
A couple more short trips to see what else is not quite right and I think I'm done!
Next - Europa Euphoria, Part 33
