John S's Journal

I’ve acquired a couple of S.U. fuel pumps from forum members that switched over to different brands plus I had the one from my wrecked ‘70 roadster that I parted out so it was time to rebuild a couple of them. One of the pumps came with some new bits installed and the rest of the rebuild kit but it wasn’t working. I also had recently ordered a rebuild kit from Burlen and it had arrived so the plan was to make two good ones with the best of the pump parts.

First up was the one that wasn’t working but had some new parts installed. While stripping it down, I could see that one of the posts wasn’t assembled properly and the coil wire wasn’t secured properly which no doubt was the problem. Opened up both the inlet and delivery chambers and removed all of the valves, screen, gaskets, etc and put the pump body into the ultrasonic cleaner along with the covers, screws and other metal bits. Installed all of the valve parts once out of the cleaner and and moved on to the rocker assembly, coil housing, and diaphragm assembly.

I cleaned up the coil housing and hit it with a coat of satin black and after that dried, it was time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
It’s a fiddly job getting the diaphragm and armature in and properly adjusted and the plastic armature spacers in between the diaphragm and the armature plate. The rebuild kit has 11 brass spacers/guides but the thought of trying to maneuver 11 of those in without them falling out seemed daunting so I reused the 5 figure-eight plastic guides. Better but still a PITA. Definitely fiddly. After rotating the diaphragm so that the rocker throw over was set properly, I got the pesky guides in place, mated the pump body with the coil housing and mounted the pedestal/rocker assembly, points, and varistor. Made all of the wire connections and then powered it up with a battery charger. Success!

Rinse and repeat on the second pump and had to open it up a second time and make a diaphragm adjustment to get it to work. All that’s left is to wait for the blue S.U. sealing tape to arrive so I can get the pedestal cap sealed up and then rig up a test rig to run some mineral spirits through both pumps. One of the two will get swapped into the GT and I’ll see if someone on the forum wants a rebuilt pump.
The one that I remove from the GT will get a refresh for a spare but I probably won’t buy the whole kit. $100+ for the kit is crazy when you can buy a Hardi for not much more.