May 5, 2006 Though there have been enqueries, still no sale. With the warmer weather the car's starting a lot easier. Filled up the car again, 40 gallons over only 835 miles. 21 MPG, not too good even for around town driving.
May 6, 2006 Poor mileage? Reluctant starting? Time to do a bit more testing I guess. I took the car for a little test drive to warm it up to operating temperature, then while it was idling I cracked each injector line. Idle dropped significantly with each one, each reaction was approximately equal, so that's good. I then pulled the glow plugs. All came out easily and were equally sooted. Also good. It was time! I dug out the Harbor Freight compression tester I'd picked up and tried it out. It goes together pretty easily, and I had no trouble putting together a set of its various adapters to get it into the glow plug holes. I connected the vacuum shutoff line to the main vacuum supply line in order to keep from injecting fuel during the test. I then did the test, eight compression strokes on each cylinder. All had equal results (modulo some badly-connected attempts where pressure bled away) of about 305-310#, which is to say above 300# on the gauge but not to the next tick at 320#. On the Bar scale I'd call it 21. The engine manual states that normal compression is 22-24 Bar, but that the minimum is 15 with maximum allowed variation of 3. I would call this good considering that the engine has over 300 kmi on it! This car's reluctance to start doesn't appear to be compression based. It is possible that the starter is slow, one or more injectors has a bad spray pattern (possibly only when cold), or the timing chain wear is to blame. All of these, if a problem, are fairly easy and inexpensive to deal with, the difficulty lies in getting a good diagnosis so that I'm not just shotgunning parts at the car. I have a used starter or two lying around, but they're of unknown quality. I wonder if there's a spec. for cranking RPM, and if so how the heck do I measure it? -- Jim
