Fuel starvation, towed home by AA, help needed

[T-Cut]

Originally Posted by StewartIngram

Looking at that pic, the square grey plastic, with the rheostat in the middle, looks as though it might unclip, leaving all the white plastic (held by 4 screws) behind. Now if I'm right, the arm can be pulled out of the tank, and maybe, just maybe, the wiper fixed on?

It does appear so. There must be something to stop the grey part sliding out. Maybe a clip - perhaps that bit visible at the top behind the white part?



TC

[StewartIngram]

Top L & R corners there are square hole in the grey bit, looks like that is where it clips I reckon. Then slide it down. Too cold to go and look today.

[StewartIngram]

Success! (Well almost, I'll comment on that at the end).

The small "butterfly" that I found in the base of the tank, rhs, was retrieved; it can just be seen in the pic on T-Cut's post (18) above. If you look at the white plastic that the metal float arm is clipped into, there are 2x slots below the wire arm, in the white plastic. The wiper is in the lh slot. This had dropped out.
The rheostat is behind the arm, on the grey plastic. The wiper bridges the 2x curved tracks.
At the top of the grey plastic base are 2x square lugs, which clip into position when the base is pushed upwards.
So I decided to slide the base downwards, thus freeing the float assembly from the pump (almost). This is easily done by using a flat screwdriver at the top of the base and twisting the blade, the base slides down easily.
The complicated bit is that you have to be a contortionist! You can't actually withdraw the pump, nor the arm from the tank. The arm is still attached by two green wires, but (if necessary) unclip those on the rhs to give a bit more freedom to move the float up. Then carefully unclip the metal arm from the white plastic and both the float and white plastic come out of the tank. To cut a long story short, I inserted the wiper and re-assembled; getting the grey plate to slide back in was tricky to say the least.
Now all of that may seem tricky, but the main difficulty is working in the confined space. For fault finding, & to save taking it all apart, a simple multimeter test can be done. This will determine if each float is ok.
Connector C0114 on top of the pump can be unplugged. There are 6 pins, numbered 1-6. (All shown on RAVE). Obviously, here we are talking of the pump side, not the unplugged cable!
Those nearest the rhs of the car are 3 & 6, and connect to the lhs filter float.
Those nearest the lhs of the car are 1 & 4, and connect to the rhs pump float.
[The centre pins are 2 & 5, connected to the pump +/-].
A check with a multimeter should show resistance on each pair ((1 & 4, 3 & 6).
In my case this was approx 118 ohms for about 3/4 tank of petrol.
I expect that a big difference in readings on either side would indicate a problem with the balance pipework.

When fully assembled, pins 1 & 3 become connected so that the gauge averages both readings, across 4 & 6.

So success for me, but I noted my reading was intermittent on 1 & 4, due to the wiper needing a slight bend. I haven't bothered to take it out again today due to the time, but will possibly do it tomorrow.

Thanks to all for help, and I hope my account may help others.

Stewart