'97 XUD9TE LUCAS, massive miss-fire and VERY bad starting

[philthyD]

I haven't started investigating on the vehicle yet but, as you probably guessed it's a 306.

On start-up it's a good job i bought a massively powerful battery a few months ago because it takes between 6 and 7 attempts on the heater plugs and about a full 2 minutes of cranking to fire on more than 2 cylinders, meanwhile filling the street with an enormous amount of un burned diesel.

The beast then continues to miss-fire once per cycle for about 30 seconds, and doesn't burn properly until just before the thermostat opens.

my first thing to check will be the heater plugs but i cant see why 2 or 3 of them would go at once.

by the way this literally just started happening suddenly last week in the snow, naturally at the time i assumed it was just the -12 temperatures outside.

can anyone point me to something such as a common issue that could be the cause or point out my cheapes option for getting started on it?

Thanks in advance

[Hell Razor5543]

I would agree that the glow plugs would be a good place to start. Under normal weather conditions the block won't have got too cold, so the engine would start fairly easily. However, with the recent weather, the block (probably) would have got a lot colder, and would need a lot more heat to get it to start. One or more failed plugs would cause problems.

Recently somebody else had a problem, and it turned out three plugs had failed. Replacing them solved that problem.

http://www.frenchcarforum.co.uk/forum/v ... =4&t=43066" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[philthyD]

worries me that 3 would go at once, if this is the case then they could be an underlying issue, that i cant afford lol, ill give them a go in the next 48hrs and post the results

[Hell Razor5543]

They may have failed over some time (months rather than days), and as (until recently) the weather has been reasonable, the block won't have got too cold, and as the ambient conditions were good, it didn't take much to get the block warmed up. With the heavy cold snap, the block has got much colder, and with poor ambient conditions, the engine needed all the help it could get to start (and if even one glow plug HAS failed the block would have stayed cold for longer).

Glow plugs do fail over time. All they are really is a high speed heating element, and the element will fail eventually. If you do find it is failed plugs, replace them all, and make sure to get the right ones for your engine.

[philthyD]

I would agree, however, their is an argument against this which is for the last few days the ambient temp has been above 6 degrees, and it's just as bad to start

[myglaren]

Is the engine turning over slowly? They need to spin pretty quickly to start efficiently. Could be corroded or broken starter/alternator/battery leads and connections.
See this thread for more info.

[philthyD]

Good advice but definately not that,
here's a video I took just now. " onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It actually started rather well here because the car was used about 1.5 to 2hrs before I filmed.
I will shoot another tomorrow morning to show full extent of the problem.

ps ignore low water level light, new level sensor tomorrow its been faulty for about 3 months.

[Peter.N.]

There is a quick way you can check your glow plugs, connect a meter between any glow plug and earth, if all of them are working you should have 10-11 volts for about 20 seconds if you have much more than this one or more glow plugs have failed.

The glow plug relay will switch the plugs off after about 20 seconds so if you want the benifit of several heatings you need to switch off and on again when you hear the relay drop out or you see the panel lights come up a bit brighter.

Peter

[citronut]

what ever the ambient temperature if one plug is down the engine will start but a little lumpy, if two are down it should start but a bit more lumpy,
if three are down less chance it will start without the aid of easy start,

[xudfanatic]

I would recommend starting with a compression test, depending on those results will give us an idea how to guide you from here. If you are good with a set of spanners then you can do it yourself, the cheapest I could find was a Silverline diesel compression testing kit from Ebay. If you did want to check your glowplugs you could check their resistance with an multimeter. Get the multimeter on the glowplug whilst they are heating the diesel before firing, 0.4 Ohms is what resistance new glowplugs have, the lower the resistance the more worn they are. At 0.1 Ohms they are only fit for the bin. Dirty/faulty injectors is one cause of glowplugs to fail, another is as mentioned earlier the glowplug relay burning the glowplugs out. Usually you only notice this if you have replaced the same glowplugs multiple times. Come back to us with you findings!