Sunday, September 5th
After some breakfast, Christophe and I began work on Betty. We switched the pumps and tried to fire her up...no go (even though I had my fingers crossed). There was fuel making it to the injectors now so it was a good sign that the pump exchange was a good call. But why wasn’t it starting? Christophe decided that we should change the four injectors too. The motor I had purchased had sat outside for a couple of years so perhaps they weren’t working correctly. He changed 3 of 4 but couldn’t remove the last one. We tried to start her again...voila! She’s alive. She definitely had a new tone, a lower more guttural purr but who cares what she sounds like...eureka, she’s running! I’ve never heard such a lovely diesel engine.
Christophe and I decided to take her for a test drive. One interesting factor was that the old engine had a mechanical pump for delivering the fuel from the tank to the main pump. We had put in a manual squeeze pump to get the juices there and things seemed to work okay, perhaps she’s pulling the fuel as needed. As we hit the road, everything felt great and she moved without hesitation. We cruised through town, heading towards the highway. After a few kilometres and a couple of roundabouts, I felt the power drop as I switched gears, and then...stall action. Luckily there was an easy pull out into which I coasted the campervan. Hmm...things seemed to be going so well. Christophe seemed to know what was the problem and suggested that a pump from the fuel tank was indeed required. We worked on starting her for about 10 minutes, trying to get the air out of the fuel lines. There was a car about 30 meters in front of us and I initially thought that they had car troubles as well. It became obvious that that was not the case as I watched a sickly looking 10 year old boy being escorted across the street to some shade from a tree by his mom. Meanwhile, dad was using wipes to clean out the obvious effects of car sickness of his son. Poor dude. I joked with Christophe that I preferred our problem over theirs...
Christophe got Betty started and we limped back to his house. Okay, we need to buy an electric pump for the final piece of the puzzle. No problem. Christophe researched them online and it looked like 60-70 Euros will get me what I need. We’ll order one at the auto parts store (where I’m becoming a regular) tomorrow.
That evening Laetitia and Pierre, the couple we went for dinner with last night, stopped by. We had some drinks with some French bread and some accompanying meat and seafood. Later we enjoyed a lovely fish dinner and interesting conversation which ranged from Laetitia’s upcoming defence of her master’s to french politics, primarily the recent suggestion to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Another fun evening with some lovely people.
No comments:
Post a Comment