FuelFlow Collision Safety Switch

Sometimes I'm a dickhead! Not a full-blown, in your face dickhead, mind you; just your regular too lazy to be arsed doing something that I really, really know that I should do 'coz it makes sense dickhead. I suspect that I'm not alone in my occasional dickheadedness.

Fuel pump relay on the left, with the safety switch on the right.

A simple question posted on the Galant Enthusiasts Australia Facebook page reminded me of this. A Mr Nancarrow asked about fitting an electric fuel pump and me, being a bit of a safety nerd and having installed said items on both of my cars, suggested that it would be a good idea to fit a kill-switch. Another bloke - Mr Roy - had a much better idea, asking: why not use a collision cut-off switch instead? I knew he was right; I'd thought about it before but had done F-A about it. Then a Mr Ford posted an eBay link, by way of an example, and the rest is history.

Power-in terminal on the top (blue cover); power-out below (red cover). The re-set knob is at the top centre.

$56.90 and a bee's penis short of $8.00 P&H soon saw two New Zealand-made FuelFlow Collision Safety Switches heading my way - one for the mighty Galant and the other destined to protect the Italian Love Machine (aka my 1978 Fiat X1/9). I bought mine from an Australian company, onlineautoparts.com.au, who got them to me within a week.

Fitting the safety switch involves nothing more complicated than mounting it horizontally on the firewall of your car, spliced into the positive cable that powers the fuel pump (please see below). In the event of a bingle, the power supply is shut down, stopping the pump from potentially spewing fuel all over the show and starting a fire. I did say that some things make sense, eh?

There's also a third terminal that can be connected into a car's hazard lights so that they're simultaneously activated if a prang occurs, although I've not bothered to wire up this function. In addition to this, a phallus-shaped lever on the switch's top restores the power supply if the car's still driveable. If the switch ever fails, I've wired it so that it can quickly and easily be bypassed, without needing to cut or rewire any of the existing cables.

I hope to never put the FuelFlow switch to the test! However, it does appear to be well-made and reasonably priced, making for very cheap insurance. I'll update this posts if I have any problems with it.

If there was a criticism, I'd say that it would be better designed if its power terminals were fitted to each side of the switch, rather than being on one side only, one above the other. This would make it simpler to wire it into an existing power cable.

So, if you're running an electric fuel pump on your car, please fit some sort of collision-activated cut-off switch, even if it's not the one featured here. I'm not actually endorsing any particular make or model; it's just common sense is all. No one's a dickhead on purpose, afterall!

U M P H

(uppermiddlepetrolhead.blogspot.com.au.)

iPhone images.

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