Well, my 1996 C1500 5.0L which is basically a spare vehicle these days, with me dreaming of restoring, it, decided to act up for the first time in many years.

I needed to move all the vehicles out of the driveway to make things easier for a furniture delivery to the house, and the C1500 was the last thing in there, closest to the garage. I cranked it up, it ran normally for 10-15 seconds, and before I put it in reverse, it just died. It turns over normally, but doesn't start.

The first thing that comes to mind is sudden death of the fuel pump. The truck is 30+ years old. I went to replace the fuel pump over 20 years ago by pulling the bed, and found that the wires had frayed and literally shorted together inside the fuel tank, and I think we just fixed the wires, separating them and heat shrinking them, and then dropped the original fuel pump back into the tank.

I'll check the obvious things like the fuel pump fuse and relay first, and check for pressure on the fuel rail. And get my wife to crank it while I look for spark on a spark plug wire.

Any other advice? It will sure be nice if I do not need to pull the bed, as that will be a lot more work and I will need help.

 

Can you hear the pump run when you 1st turn on the key to run position?

 

I could not hear anything in the cab Thursday when this happened, but the problem is when I turn the key to the run position, but not crank, some darned buzzer/chime runs for several seconds, which would totally mask any sound I might here in the cab from the fuel pump. I guess I need to reach in and turn the key from outside the cab so I can drop down and listen quickly, or get my wife to turn the key for me while I am under the gas tank.

 

Well, I had just a few minutes to look at the situation on Saturday. There is most definitely no noise from the fuel pump when the key is turned to the run position, and normally, I know it should run for at least a couple of seconds to pressurize the fuel rail.

I popped the hood to check the relay, and found this. This is not the original relay, as it is not a grey OMRON like the rest of them, so I've apparently replaced this at some point in the past 30 years. Probably 20 or so years ago when I had an issue with the fuel pump wires shorting inside the gas tank (yes - inside the tank!).

This is the bottom of the relay - you can see that one pin has been pretty hot, and that might be dated to when the fuel pump cut out due to a short 20+ years ago... or it could be recent. Who knows?




And here you can see some matching "melt" damage in the fuse/relay box under the hood...



Unfortunatley, there are no other 5 pin relays under the hood to swap with this one - the others of similar size are all 4 pins. So I guess this issue will sit while I go ahead and order a relay AND a fuel pump from RockAuto. If I am lucky, the relay will be it. And if I am not lucky, I'll be unbolting and disconnecting a lot of stuff under the bed, and taking off the tailgate, tail lights, tool box, etc, so that I can get my son and son in law to drop by one day and help me lift and walk the bed off the truck and set it in the garage.

I am lucky that I live in Alabama. If I lived farther north all the bed bolts would be rusted up and likely not removable. As it stands, I did this once, 20 years ago, which I was 40 versus 60, and do not look forward to doing it again.

Sadly this is another knock against the C1500 that my wife wants out of the driveway due to how bad the original paint looks... I am tempted to just start a home paint job of the cab while the bed is off, if I have to pull it.