Hello again, all. My beloved CRD is running great again thanks to some recent work, except for a few things that are raising some red flags for me. I won't bias the responses by putting my own theory out there.
First, a bit of
background: 140k on it the vehicle, regular maintenance at 3k with Mobil 1, timing belt changed at 100k...essentially I've been following the recommended maintenance. It has the EHM mod, original boost hoses, and when I recently did work the airflow valve was only dirty, not clogged. Recent work included pulling the FCV and cleaning it, along with everything that came off that side of the intake. The reason was that I was throwing 0299 and 0234 codes: underboost and overboost respectively. Turned out that the codes were correct, because my turbo vanes had frozen at about the midpoint.
Based on input here, over about a week I tried "the Italian tuneup," where you find a hill and floor it. Invariably it would throw the 234 code at that point, and it never fixed the issue. So off came the turbo, and after lots of cleaning and judicious application of graphite, I'm happy to report that no more boost issues are coming up.
At the same time, I also replaced all 4 glow plugs because one of them was bad. I had assumed that the missing glow plug was part of the reason I had been getting hard starts and a bit of smoke on startup. But it's summer now, so cooler weather is also gone. I also repaired the Kennedy lift pump I have, and made sure there wasn't air in the Racor filter head I'm using.
Okay, now for
the symptoms:
- For some time now, I appear to be very slowly losing coolant. Very slowly, as in I can top off the overflow and leave it for 1,200 miles or so before the light shows any sign of coming back on.
- Starting when cold sounds like there is air in the fuel...it stumbles for a bit, as though it is firing on 2 of 4 cylinders. This can happen with the engine warm, too, but less frequently. No particular pattern to it that I can tell.
- I have on a couple of occasions smelled that sweet smell of burnt coolant, around the time I'm starting it up. I don't notice that smell when I circle back around to the tailpipe, but I haven't done that when the exhaust is really smoky.
- On cooler mornings like today (55F), the first mile or half mile of driving has me showing quite a bit of whiteish smoke out of the tailpipe. After that it clears up just fine and runs perfectly
So I'm not convinced that I'm losing the coolant into the engine, but I haven't spotted any leaks outside. Given how slow the leak is, and given that it gets parked on gravel, I might not see a leak. And if it leaks onto the downpipe, that might make for the sweet smell. But not for the smoke in the exhaust. And it could be that the stumbling starts are unrelated, but...coincidences are not my first line of thinking.
So...I open it up to the collective genius of the LOST community. Any thoughts?