Hi All

My little tale of woe that might be of use to others. 1999 Morgan two seater 4/4 fitted with Ford Zetec 1.8 silver top petrol engine.

Car was running fine when last used then left in the garage during December and the first two weeks of January. Nice day arrived let's go for a ride. Car would not start. Checked fuel pressure that was normal. Checked for sparks no sparks cylinders 1 and 2.
The coil pack fitted to this car sparks cylinders in pairs, cylinders 1 and 3 together then 2 and 4 together, this is the so-called wasted spark arrangement. It works because only one of the two sparked cylinders is on a compression stroke the other is on exhaust. With 1 and 2 not sparking fault must be common to both pairs. Checked the 12 volt supply to the coil pack and this was missing. This is the common power feed for the two primary windings inside the coil pack. Connected a temporary 12 volt feed to this point and car started immediately.

After many hours of tedious wire tracing, found the fault to be a dislodged female pin, pin 1 in a 12 way connector located under the bonnet, drivers side (UK) near the fuel filter and tool storage box see photo below. This dislodged pin was not obvious. The giveaway was the small yellow ribbed rubber seal you can see on the wire. This seal pushes into the connector housing behind the pin and should be well inside the housing, but on this pin (pin 1) it was protruding slightly. If you look closely at the photo you can see there is another pin with a black wire attached three holes down (pin 4) that has the yellow seal protruding just like it was on pin 1. This pin (pin 4) was also dislodged but not far enough back to become disconnected. The pins have a couple of barbs that should stop the pin from coming out of the connector housing once they have been pushed home into the housing. These barbs needed a slight tweak to make the pin latch properly into the housing.

I can find no wiring details of this car so I decided to try and trace the rest of the wires passing through this connector and draw a diagram, see below. Some of these wires lead to a 6 way connector located near the throttle body. Now the disclaimer. You're welcome to use the diagram but at your own risk. I have traced these wires using continuity and voltage measurements only. Also I have not traced all of these wires end to end, in particular those that are shown connected to the ECU (the ECU on this car is very difficult to get at). For the ECU pin numbers I used an engine wiring diagram contained in the Haynes manual for the Ford Escort and Orion 1990 to 2000 manual number 1737. The diagram is on page 12.52. The wire colours on the Morgan for all the injectors, sensors and actuators match this Haynes diagram so I am pretty sure the car is fitted with a standard Ford Escort SEFI engine loom. Also a while ago I obtained a used ECU of the same type fitted in the Morgan and ran it up on an ECU test rig I constructed. So far I have been able to confirm about 40% of these pin numbers. This is still work in progress.

Finally after pulling every fuse on the car one by one I can find no fuse that, if blown, would break the specific “ignition on” feed to injectors, MAF sensor, speed sensor etc connected via pin 5 of the 12 way connector on my diagram. It would seem that this feed is not fused !! If anyone has been down this path before and has found such a fuse I would be delighted to know the details. Apologies for the long post but hope it will be of use to others.

Regards Tony

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