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Posted by Greg Coffin [4.228.135.95] on Thursday, August 02, 2012 at 19:43:00 :
I'm in charge of vehicle maintenance at our local volunteer rescue squad. The other day our dive van, a 2003 Freightliner bread truck with Cummins 5.9 diesel engine, died on the way back from a call. We limped it home and eventually got it to a nearby trucking company that also has a service department. They have been good to us in the past, and I hoped they would be able to figure out the problem and get us back on the road ASAP.
Well that didn't happen. They spent 2 weeks trying to find the problem. There were no trouble codes on the ECU, and the truck would sometimes run fine. The problem appeared to be fuel related, but they couldn't figure it out. They spent hours chasing down rabbit holes. And after replacing the fuel filters ($$), transfer pump ($$$), engine wiring harness ($$$$), and computerized injection pump ($$$$), the truck still ran terribly.
After two weeks of this, I took the truck to a heavy truck shop several a few towns away. The next day I got the call that they had found the problem. It was a bad injector that was allowing combustion pressure to backfeed into the injector pump through the fuel return line (it goes to the injector pump rather than the fuel tank). Which is why there were no trouble codes. But the reason that the injector failed was...
Someone filled the fuel tank with gasoline.
The moral of this story is: Check the simple things first before you proceed to more advanced solutions. Start with the very basics: Fuel, Air, Spark. Then move ahead. It could save you a lot of time and money.
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