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Re: [Healeys] No Power

To: Bob Spidell <bspidell@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [Healeys] No Power
From: John Harper <ah@jharper.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:34:43 +0100
Bob

I think that I am one of the people that you are in violent disagreement 
with. Well at least up to a point.

I drove old cars as my main car as much as 55 years ago fitted with SU 
pumps. These were mainly Morris Minors and A-H 100s plus a few 'odd 
balls'. I now drive a 100 as a classic car. In all those years I have 
rarely had problems with pump points if certain care is taken and no, I 
don't regularly clean the points.

On Morris Minors a 'L' type pump was normally fitted and this had a 
single pair of point . These did not give much trouble and at one time 
about every fourth car on the British road was a Morris Minor.

However when the HP (High Pressure) pump started to be used with same 
single points there were some problems. This gave reliability problems 
on early 100s if these had the early AUA 36 pump with a single contact 
fitted. The official service replacement was the AUA 56 and this had 
double points. From that time on I personally never had a problem. Here 
however I have to admit that at that time I did not own my own 100 but 
did look after a colleague's who was better off than me.

Later on the pump was superseded again but was virtually the same but 
with a raised cap to allow for a capacitor. Later still, as you know, 
they replaced this with a diode.

If SU electric pumps were not reasonably reliable then how is it that 
cars made in large numbers such as the Mini and prestige cars such as a 
Jaguar continued to use them?

Back to my own recent experience, the only problem I have had over the 
last ten years or so is the over tight diaphragm as discussed previously 
and a contact riveting coming loose from its spring leaf. In this case 
the contact stayed half in place but by doing so stopped the second pair 
of contacts taking over but made poor contact itself. This was clearly a 
manufacturing fault.

As you perhaps now realise I have a high regard for SU pumps if they are 
set up correctly. I don't say that they are perfect and they do appear 
to attract a lot of bad publicity. I believe that a lot of the problems 
might be with the people who supply them! Perhaps they should provide a 
full test certificate with each one?

Regards

>
>I think we're in violent agreement here.  Points are the SU fuel pumps' 
>weak knee; if you clean/replace and adjust the points every few 
>thousand miles--Norman Nock once told me they did this as routine 
>service back in the day--they probably won't fail.  But that's hardly 
>the epitome of durability and reliability (mechanical pumps, for 
>instance, can be expected to last up to the life of an engine).
>

-- 
John Harper
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