Hans Efde wrote:That sounds similar to our experience. Spuriously our Rover would not start, hot or cold. We then fumbled with the wire loom and it would start again. Funny sight that must have been when road workers in our street witnessed my blond wife getting out of her non starting car, pop the bonnet, fumble with the wiring, start the car and close the bonnet again. But in the end the crank sensor was replaced and since then the starting problems were over. Probably a combination of both the wiring and sensor close to the operating limits.
That does sound similar! I also appear to have cleared the common high idling problem and the dodgy fuel pump relay the same way. When I stripped the loom out I found wires that had kinks in them, particularly where the loom split into different arms. The looms appear to be constructed poorly from materials that don't stand the test of time.
The crank sensor was a weird one, when the car wouldn't start there was no signal to the coil, putting the multimeter across the sensor terminals just gave an open circuit. This persisted after I removed the sensor but later in the day it showed resistance across the terminals, presumably had it still been fitted the car would have started at this point. I've never had an intermittent failure of one of these before, they have either worked or not.