Well, you should have battery power at the fuel pump harness plug, 8volts is very low, and when the circuit is loaded by the pump the voltage drops even lower. Since the pump is holding pressure, the check valve in the pump seems to be okay, did you replace the filter as well when doing the pump?
It sounds like there is just low voltage back at the tank. I would check the fuel pump relay, these would corrode from underneath the fuse/relay boxes and cause all kinds of problems, many times the connectors for relays or fuses would just end up breaking off. Since the fuel pump relay is in the engine compartment fuse panel, its exposed to the elements. Pull the relay out and check for corrosion there as well as a voltage reading, see if its low at that point also. With the relay removed there should be one pin that has power all the time, thats the power wire that feeds the pump when the relay is energized, the Orange wire (pin 87) from the ECM BAT Fuse 20amp. If you have full battery power at that location, we can work our way back to the pump from there to locate the problem area.
Theres also going to be a purple wire at the tank connector, that's for the gauge, you want the grey wire (B+) and the black wire. The pump may be making a low frequency noise due to low voltage.
So your test light hooked to B+ and touching the prime connector was grounding through the pump itself.
Technically you could put battery voltage to the prime connector and the pump should run, I'd use a fused wire to do so though. You can also use the prime connector as a test point, with the fuel pump connector unplugged, put power to the prime connector (red wire) and see if you're getting the same voltage reading at the pump's grey wire. If you put 12-volts to it and only get 7-8volts at the pump, you know there's an issue with either the relay circuit or grey wire running to the back of the vehicle. But the low voltage is going to be the reason you didnt get any fuel volume out of the pressure gauge.
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2025 AT 12:54 PM