Went to pick up gf from uni yesterday whilst marvelling my decreasing fuel economy, stopped the car, picked her up... cranked... nothing!

A bit of wee came out and then I cranked the engine.... nothing . !

Armed and disarmed alarm.... nothing.

So by now I was thinking 'maybe my immobiliser wiring for the fuel pump has gone silly'.

Luckily I was moving myself back to uni as well and so had everything in my car.... got out the multimeter and stuck it in the fuel pump wire at the main relay to see if a reading came up, I didn't think it was priming. However it was.... but on that crank it started up. (So it would have been left for a few minutes). It took a little while than longer to crank though.

The rest of the day it took a little while longer to crank a couple of times and one time was perfert.

I'm wondering if this is somehow related to a post I made a while ago saying that it sometimes took a little while longer to crank than normal and that I thought it may be main relay... I think the verdict from reading other peoples posts with that is that it seems to be main relay or coil... However I didn't think that the main relay problem would cause an engine to slowly die...

To me, coil/bad dizzy would also account for loss of fuel economy at the moment.

Think I'm heading along the right path.... or do you completely disagree?

 

Loosing the main relay and dying slowly sounds like loosing fuel pressure to me, but maybe you can tell us what your definition of dying slowly means, how slowly. Since you know how to test the relay then just leave your meter hooked up, cranking with no power out of the relay means bad relay, if it gets power and primes the pump then look at a weak pump, fuel pressure test may be in order next, ignition analysis will be after that, ignitor could be going on the fritz. Do you have a tach and what is it doing when the car dies, what is it doing when the car will not start up easily. It gets its signal directly from the ignition coil, even while cranking on a no start.