(hopefully) Found the cause of my no-starting issue today.

[77Datz]

After two weeks of digging around in my 77' 280Z, I think I may have finally found the cause of my problem. I brought the car home knowing it had issues, I dropped 2k on this beautiful 280z that refused to start. The owner before me told me he ran it out of gas and let it sit for two years. I wouldn't have bought the car if he didn't show me the receipts for the work he had done on the engine. He spent over 11k getting the engine rebuilt in 2004, the car had 5k miles on the rebuild. I figured it was something simple, like it needed a new fuel filter and some other minimal work to get it started. Over the past two week I put new fuel hoses in, new fuel filter, cleaned the injectors, checked fuel pressure and compression, cleaned the fuel pump terminals and either cleaned or replaced as many electrical connections i could find in the engine compartment. I also replaced the battery terminals, and the black fusible link, the starter as well. I narrowed the problem down to the injectors not firing, they weren't getting a pulse from the ECU, which lead me to believe that my computer was bad.Today I went through the EFI 'bible' and checked the 35-pin connector, and everything checked out fine. I also found an aftermarket alarm box under the dash which had a burned out capacitor, which melted both the board and the case. I removed that whole mess and repaired the harness, still no start. I took the computer back off and opened it up to check the components inside and this is what I found:

A fried power transistor, just to prove that it was this little bastard, i manually shorted the injectors by sticking a wire in the 35-pin connector at the injector ground pins and shorted the other end to vehicle ground, and they all clicked and sprayed gas. So, I ordered a new ECU off ebay for $75, and i might get another power transistor to try and fix my original computer. I'm hoping that this is whats preventing my 280z from starting up. Once I fix the computer I'll update with status.

[e-tek]

Nice score if that's what it is! Looking forward to more pics!

[Zed Head]

Good detective work. The power transistors are the two silver disc-shaped objects on the top though, your burned object might be a capacitor. Just a guess, someone that knows electronics would recognize the shape. The sealed can look fits capacitor.

Someone else on this forum found a similar burned object. They were going to try a fix also, never heard what happened. I replaced the transistors on an ECU so fixing the ECU is possible, but my parts weren't over-heated, they just went bad internally.