dirtmover wrote:
It shouldn't be smoking like this. Mine only blows any noticeable smoke when I give it some serious wellie and even then only if I've not pushed it for a few days. It may be related to the reason that you've experienced so many EGR failures.
Could be, but it's been that way since Day 1. I followed another Liberty CRD a few weeks ago and it was smoking the same amount. It's not like our CRD is blowing great clouds of soot - but if I follow my wife I can see a light haze of smoke during acceleration with random little puffs of black at shift points. It's not real obvious looking in the mirrors, but at night the headlights behind showcase it more.
It is on it's 3rd FCV, also. It has always had clean air and fuel filters, regular oil changes, and run well with mileage on par with everyone else - 21 city/26 hwy.
I'm recall that just prior to production, there was a last minute ECM recalibration due to an emissions certification failure on the CRD. Later it was determined that the equipment was either defective or not calibrated properly, so the ECM recalibration was not really needed.
My opinion is that the NOx was out of limits, so Chrysler cranked up the EGR all the way to get the NOx down. Since soot/particulates were not as much of a concern, they didn't care as long as the NOx was within limits. However, running with the EGR duty cycle that high fries the EGR valve, trashes the FCV as it goes wild trying to keep enough vacuum to suck in enough EGR gasses, and fills up the engine with soot as it is forced to eat it's own crud and with all that EGR, there's not enough O2 to burn the fuel properly, which just makes more soot. The engine literally is choking to death on it's own excrement.
I can't believe how much snappier, cleaner, stronger, and more responsive it runs with the SEGR module. It runs like my Jetta now. Smells like it, too. The cat converter is finally working as intended rather than just filling up with soot. I used to take the CRD out once a month or so and really blast it a few times. The first full-throttle run up through the gears would lay down an enormous black cloud as it blew out all the accumulated crap from the exhaust system. After a few runs like that, it would quit smoking so much. But even a day or two later, I could repeat the same deal.
Two days on SEGR, I have yet to see any appreciable amount of smoke at any throttle. We'll see how the fuel mileage is on this tank, too.
I can't blame the engine - I never see a Duramax or Cummins smoke unless it's been "tweaked". The engine is the victim of inept application engineering.
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So, I installed valve #5 and a few weeks later (this past weekend) installed the SEGR kit. It is a tedious install, made worse by the fact I was over-confident and sliced in the wires and then buttoned the whole wiring tray up only to find I somehow got the wrong wire for the tranny sense.