Friday, January 13, 2017

Serious Progress.

Book link. 

Yeah, every time.

Man, I got a lot done over the last few days.  I thought the rebuild would be the harder part, but it hasn't been as bad as I thought.

When last we spoke, I had just magicked the y-bridge back together. 

If you don't believe in magic, go ahead and try it yourself

Working back out and trying to go in reverse order according to my notebook, it was time to rebuild the fuel system. 

A couple of pointers.

Don't torque anything until you are sure you have everything where it goes. I forgot to put the bracket that goes on the driver's side common fuel rail and had to pull it off.  Take detailed notes, better than mine, about the order in which you removed the fuel lines, it will help.

Clean everything.

I think the coolant line to the turbo (the one with tape on it) should be first.

The line from the CP3 pump to the driver's side rail is a good next. Note the bracket that attaches with the rail
Right about here, the pictures start to get a bit spotty.  Two things: First, the lines only go on one way and if you were good about labeling things as you took them off, putting them back on is pretty straight forward.  Second, it has been cold here... Really cold.  Temperatures inside the garage were probably high twenties. Stopping to take pictures just didn't always occur to me.

Not sorry. 

This is the next picture I took.  Fuel system is largely put together and I had the air intake tube in as well as the thermostat housing on.

Stay busy, stay warm.


The wires to the right of the thermostat housing were hanging down. Make sure to put them up before attaching the thermostat housing.

At this point I was just following the sequence in the notebook.  I took a couple pictures when I remembered to.  They were somewhat random. Hypothermia will do that to you.

I'll try to remember what I was thinking.

In this first one, you will see the glow plug controller bracket and sub bracket on. Not that I connected the fuel lines. That was premature. I connected them before I put the bracket in place, then disconnected them to put the bracket on and reconnected them. Then, I ended up disconnecting them again later to get the lines to the controller.  Just leave them disconnected until the entire glow plug controller is on and connected.

Premature connection.
 Then there was this one.

Fuel filter bracket.
Just pretty I guess.
This next one gets an explanation.

I put in the glow plugs. Then prior to installing the ignition wiring harness, I pulled the retaining nuts off. Notice the heat shield surrounding the exhaust manifold?  There is a gap between the manifold and the shield. It's a pretty small gap. There is really only one nut in the entire engine bay that could fall into that gap and cause you to pull off the heat shield to get it out.

Guess which nut.  Go ahead.
Things were progressing pretty well.  Using the pictures from the tear down and the order from the notebook, it went pretty well.  Then I go to the wiring harness.  The hydra.

Looks easy enough.
It wasn't as bad as I had feared.  I labeled the glow plug wires and injector connections. With those in place, everything else fell where it was supposed to. The engineers were pretty good about making sure that no connectors were alike so things couldn't accidentally be plugged in where they didn't belong. 

Like an octopus attacking the engine.
Then I started putting on big things. Things like alternators and AC compressors. I also put on the thing I labeled The Big Fucking Metal Thing. I could probably give the technical name, but I like TBFMT better.  Oh yeah, another interesting note. I didn't know what things were when I pulled them off a lot of the time. So I called them one thing without realizing until later, they weren't that at all.

Take lots of pictures.

The big fucking metal thing in question

As I left it today.
 Tonight I go out and get a new serpentine belt, seems sill not to change it. I also get oil and coolant. I should be ready to try to fire this thing back up on Monday or Tuesday. I could probably try tomorrow or Sunday, but I work and I want a full day off to account for the inevitable unforeseen contingency.

For those playing along with the home game, these are my notes.  I won't call this a how-to article until it fires up and works. Until then, this isn't what to do so much as what I did.