GordnadoCRD wrote:
I sense that you're beginning to understand why those of us that love these rigs almost never take them to commercial mechanics for problems like this. Most don't understand how they work, and They can't make money rooting around for simple problems. So they blindly throw parts at it, and recommend getting a different vehicle.
Nope, totally understood. I'm used to owning unicorn vehicles where you are your support for it (right now, the KJ's parked across from a Peugeot 505, which is far from being my first oddball - or even French - vehicle), but this one has been particularly exceptional at raising my frustration levels. It's no joke when I say that it's been easier to find Citroën parts in North America than it has KJ CRD parts at times.
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That isn't necessarily always bad advice, but once you can walk your way through a system in your mind, you can narrow down the list of things that might cause your symptoms, and the actual fix is rarely expensive, once it's discovered.
PITA... Yes
Inconvenient... yes sometimes
darn difficult... Usually, yes
but rarely expensive, and if the problem is common, there is usually SOMEONE who has come up with an ingenious fix that can be found somewhere in this forum.
And having that support is key. I can generally figure things out, but when it comes to issues that are vehicle-specific (i.e., certain things that just tend to wear out or otherwise go south over time), that's where I start looking for sanity checks before really tearing into things, because that way lies throwing parts at the problem and I'm not a fan of that approach. The other side of the coin is that even when systems or components that are common between vehicles exhibit signs of failure, they may not fail in the same ways (or mask other issues, or raise false positives, etc.) as on other vehicles, so asking questions becomes key.
Having the vacuum line break when I jiggled it yesterday falls into this as well - in my head, I understand how the system operates. But until there's something that I can actually point at as a definitive cause or contributing factor, it's academic. Now it's ingrained. It's funny how much of a relief it was to hear the line actually crack; that was the moment where it all started coming together and I could see the problem completely systemically vs. the knowledge of what the potential causes were just being a bunch of recalled facts.
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Then there are a few that are just mind-blowingly expensive, such as dropped valves, TB problems, etc., that a single component like a new head can cost more than a blueprinted GM crate motor, all by themselves, and preventive measures that seem excessive by themselves, when compared to the potential expense of a failed component (exhaust valves) are relatively cheap insurance.
At that point, I suspect that the KJ
would be a CRD-shaped bonfire somewhere
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We'll see what happens when it gets here in a day or two...
