alfmech Posted August 24, 2012 Share Posted August 24, 2012 fired up my old girl this morning to go help a fellow 2a owner that was lying at the side of the road, she took a little more cranking to start than normal but when it did start seemed perfectly fine and drove fine, arrived at the scene after about 10mins and left it to idle while i looked at his and hooked up a rope to pull it with, suddenly she died snd refused to restart cranked over like was lacking fuel so assumed i had a lying fuel gauge so a quick phone call and some replacement fuel was on its way. after topping up the fuel and cranking for a while to bleed it up she started fine huge sigh of relief. hooked up the dead 2a and drove off.....1mile later it died again this time with a loss of power first then chugged to a halt poked about to check for faults nothing found, tried again and after a bit of cranking it sprang to life no apparent problems :S low and behold if the bugger didnt expire again after aproximatly a mile and refuse to start. thought bugger this for a game of soldiers and went to get the other daily shed of a bmw and pulled the other landy in with no furthur hitches then back again to mine and hey presto a bit of cranking and it started and scooted along for....yeah you guessed it another mile Grrrrr 500yds from home sat in a cranky 2a that dosnt want to go home off to grab the bmw again and drag the damn thing back now sat in my drive happily ticking over with no hiccups for last 40mins........WTF?? any clues anyone? all electrics appear sound no oil or fuel leaks nothing out of the ordinary stop relay working happily owner proper confused/embarrased Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheRecklessEngineer Posted August 24, 2012 Share Posted August 24, 2012 Classic fuel starvation. Check strainer/filers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tugboat Posted August 25, 2012 Share Posted August 25, 2012 Check the lift pump. I had a similar problem with a Thornycroft marine diesel with an almost identical AC Delco pump. The pump was almost new (Turkish made copy, supplied by a Thornycroft specialist at that...) primed perfectly etc., but in rough seas I would get, as the previous poster said, classic fuel starvation. After about half a dozen experiences like this over two years, it turned out that I was actually running on a syphon, aided a bit by the injection pump internal circulator. When the syphon was broken by fuel sloshing in the tank, that was it! Changing the filter and priming the system would cure the problem, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for months. I put it down initially to contaminated fuel (a very common problem with marine diesel suppliers) or a rusty tank, kept changing filters and so on, COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE THE PUMP! I changed the tank too because admittedly it need changed but the intermittent starvation problem persisted. Eventually I found that the fulcrum pin for the camshaft driven lever had worked out of the pump body and dropped into the bilge. I hadn't realised that the hand primer operated on a different fulcrum pin (awkward location in the boat), hence all appeared to be ok with it when priming. The Land Rover pump is a very similar AC Delco design and also has a separate pivot for the primer lever. Delphi are successors to AC Delco (and Lucas CAV) and given that a lot of suppliers are pushing the "genuine Delphi pump" tag, I'm guessing that dud clones are becoming known to be problematic. The Delphi HFP181 is for the 2.25 diesel, generally about £25 for a genuine Delphi pump, but Dieselpartsdirect seem to be doing them for £14 (check it's a genuine Delphi before purchase). At that price, if in the slightest of doubt about your existing pump, I'd change it. Chinese copies are available for under a tenner but after my experience with a rip-off £35(!) Turkish copy of an AC pump, never again. The really annoying thing in my case was that the 10000 hours original AC I'd changed for the Turkish junk in a bit of preventative maintenance had been working perfectly well. And in rough weather in a boat, my failed pump could have been a lot worse than inconvenient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alfmech Posted August 25, 2012 Author Share Posted August 25, 2012 stop solenoid checked and working fine next tasks are new fuel filter to go in and bleed check the pickup for carp or break, check fuel lines for air leak, check lift pump spewing fuel when cranked and piriming correctly is there a particle filter on the injector pump that might need cleaning/checking? is there anything else i should check or should that cover it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheRecklessEngineer Posted August 26, 2012 Share Posted August 26, 2012 No particle filter - just the fuel filter. There might be a coarse filter on the lift pump. If you take the inlet pipe off, you should be able to see it if it's present. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snagger Posted August 27, 2012 Share Posted August 27, 2012 There won't be a filter on the lift pump, just the main filter, a gauze on the tank pick up and possibly an in-line filter or sedimenter added by whoever did the conversion. Check the filter housing o-rings for dirt or perishing, and make sure only one ring is fitted in the housing as having two can cause leaks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lexi Posted August 27, 2012 Share Posted August 27, 2012 You can prove any of your suspicions by gravity feeding the pump from a can with the bulb type primer unit from outboard motor tank. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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