JUST READ THE DIRECTIONS!

A day of vacation was taken today to take my wife to the doctor in the morning and it was a great time to take off, as the floor installers were also coming to lay our new kitchen and bathroom floors. We arrived back home around 10:30 am and after discussing some details with the floor installer, went out to work on the Fiero.

Another JLD5740 had arrived, so I hooked it up on one of the Better Place Modules in the Garage, with the same results, no voltage reading. Perplexed, I went back inside and pulled up the PDF instructions again and even watched John Allen's video of how to set it up. Then on about the 10th time of going through the instructions, I noticed that there was a 0089 code that brought up a screen to set the DC voltage range.

DC VOLTAGE RANGE SETTING

I guess your really read the instructions thoroughly before trying to setup a digital voltmeter! OK, I was on a roll now so I took the original meter and set out to install it in the car. After all of the wired were connected and settings checked on the meter, still ZERO volts! How could this be.....until I noticed that the wire had slipped out of the eye terminal crimp and was just dangling. After the new eye terminal was crimped to the wire, voilà, the meter read 117 volts. Well this was kind of good but kind of bad, since the meter in the car was reading 131.9 volts. Back into the set up menu to change the DC setting to 120 to 100 volts and change the positive pack voltage wire from the 500 to 100 volt terminal. Finally, the meter was reading 131.7 volts and life was good again. I can calibrate the meter with the offset function but .2 volts low is probably close enough. Now on to hooking up the contactors to close between 90 and 137 volts.

Also the new vacuum pump was hooked up but when the the car was turned on, nothing happened. I went up front and when inspecting the wires, the pump kicked on but then would not shut off. The vacuum switch was removed and a vacuum gauge was connected, reading 20 inches when the pump was running. This should be pleanty because the AirTron F-4200-X30 should kick off at 14.1 inches. After jiggling the wires a little, the pump shut off and then would not start back up, so when I was removing the tank, the common terminal must have been broken. Not to worry because EBAY has just about anything you could want and a new one is in transit as I type this blog post.

AirTron F4200-X30 VACUUM SWITCH

The new brake vacuum with not have a tank and the pump is so much quieter that it really solves one of my worst dislikes about the car, the extremely loud vacuum pump. The rotary vacuum pump has a much higher  pitch and much lower decibel level that really isn't that noticeable.

Thanks for viewing,

Randy