A couple weeks back I hit some real rough road on my way home from my mechanic neighbor’s shop. The car started running out of power, I made it another couple hundred feet before it died. With help from said neighbor we were able to push it down the road to a safe spot, where Hagerty towing picked it up.

I have a fuel pressure gauge in the engine bay, whenever I would engage the pump it would build up pressure and immediately fall to zero. I thought I had a bad injector or maybe the cold start valve failed, so I pulled them all individually and checked them; they were all leaking. A Noid light showed them all to be open. WTH? My neighbor suspected the ECU, but based on what I’ve read they rarely fail.

Anyway everything else seemed ok so I put out a WTB and Jim Hoyland responded with a unit and an offer to check it out and then buy it if it worked . So last evening I pulled the harness off the one in the car and plugged it into the new one. Presto! Pressure held right where it should. A quick experiment putting the harness back into the old one got the same previous result. So I’m pretty confident that the problem has been resolved.

As much as I wanted to start it, I did not based on the oil reeking of gas. So I’ll do a change, and see what happens.

Big thanks to Jim for helping out, it’s a great community.

Looks like you fall into the 10 % group for ECU failure. 90 % of the time it is a brittle wire harness and bad connections. You might have some loose parts in the ecu itself. Vibration got to some on the solder joints.

Yes, I agree. I may open it up just for kicks. But with all 4 injectors dumping fuel I figured it had to be the brain.

The brain...

If you open it up, you will find there is no "Brain" to speak of. No processor, no integrated circuits, just a bunch of big transistors, resistors, capacitors and inductors.
Just big, over engineered durable parts. I would guess that one of the caps failed due to age.

That's great news Joe.....you were right all along !
I would have that old one open in about a minute. I'd be so curious.

Great news ! Good thing you were not 400 miles down the road... Honest, you are the first 914 owner I know of that lost their brain; it would be very cool to do a post-mortem.
Seems like Spoke revised a set up to diagnose the ECU

I've had one fail. Lost the fuel pump circuit

Heading out to pick up some oil and get it changed. Will report back later.

Me too, twice

Ok, happy to report its back up and running. Props to Jim Hoyland for his generous offer and expeditious action, what a great asset to this community. Thanks Jim!

I changed the oil and got it to start, albeit with a couple snags. But got it to run, was definitely running rich by the white smoke and high readings on the A/F ratio gauge. So not only was I able to dial back the static but also the spring on the “barn door”, and the idle mixture.

A few adjustments later and it’s running really well. It seems to be happier with a slightly leaner mixture. It’s like a black science, figuring this stuff out. Itinerant Air is a great resource also.

Happy and Reflective Memorial Day to all.

I’m gonna take a drive.

Get out there. Good job.

Hooray! Great job! These cars are a bit finicky, but once they get dialed in they're such a pleasure to drive (and hear).

So I opened up the ECU (two screws on the rear allow the guts to slide out of the case) but didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it.

I didn’t go much further than that.

Kinda reminded me of Electronics shop, circa 1973...

me too, also...