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Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Chapter 11

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Faye swapped the two connectors in ninety seconds. She stepped back. "That's one. Crank it for me. Two seconds only."Margaret climbed into the driver's seat and pressed the start button. The starter spun for two seconds. The engine turned, but did not catch.Faye held up her hand. "Stop. Good. It's not fixed yet. But listen." She closed her eyes. "The crank is even now. Before, it was skipping. That was the ECU fighting impossible numbers. Now it's just not getting enough fuel pressure. That's the second problem."The second finding took her twenty-nine minutes. She asked Margaret to crank it again briefly while Faye pressed her bare hand flat against the high-pressure fuel rail, a solid machined aluminum bar running across the top of the engine. Most engineers would have used a pressure gauge; Faye used her palm.After two seconds, she pulled her hand back. "The rail is oscillating.""Oscillating?""The fuel pressure regulator is hunting. It's supposed to hold steady at 58 pounds per square inch. It's bouncing around. I can feel it pulsing at about four cycles per second. The regulator is looking for a set point and can't find one. Something is pulling its reference voltage low."She asked for the Fluke multimeter; Margaret handed it to her. Faye pulled a small paperclip from her notebook, straightened one end, and used it to back-probe a specific pin on the regulator's connector while the ignition was in the "on" position but the engine was not running.The meter read 4.3 volts."Should be 5.0. Exactly 5.0. The regulator's reference line is sagging.""Why?""Ground fault. Somewhere between the regulator and the chassis. Help me trace it."They traced the ground strap—a braided copper cable about the thickness of a pencil—from the regulator down the back of the engine, across a bracket, and to a bolt on the frame rail.Faye crouched down. She ran her thumbnail across the bolt head. She looked up at Margaret. "Paint.""Paint?"
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Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

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