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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Generator Round 2

When we got up this morning we grabbed the tools, the recharged starter battery, and the gas syphon.  The plan was to remove all the diesel from the generator and replace it with known good diesel from Wanuskewin’s deck tanks.  Bad fuel was pretty much the only thing left to try after yesterday’s troubleshooting.

When Dave took apart the gas tank to clean it, he found that there was a fuel filter inside the tank assembly.  It had a little bit of grunge on it, but it wasn’t bad.  And the gas that came out of the tank had a few bits of debris, but with the filter that wouldn’t have been a problem.

We then filtered the gas we put into the generator just to be absolutely certain it was clean.

The guys then bled the air out of the fuel system again.

Alas, these were the sad faces when it still didn’t work.

The guys took it apart again, took out the spring we put in yesterday, just to be certain the spring was in fact required.  They found that fuel didn’t flow without it.  They took the injector out again and noticed that someone had probably tried to take the injector itself apart because it had some score marks that looked like someone had gone at it with a wrench.

In the end, it’s our belief that there is something more fundamentally wrong causing the compression or injector timing to be wrong.  In fact, in all likelihood, what happened was that the fundamental issue occurred, and then Domingo tried to figure out how to fix it.  He probably took the pump apart, the spring got lost, he then presumably reassembled it wrong (as the final pump configuration that worked wasn’t the way it was when the guys first took it apart).  Then when Domingo checked the fuel flow at the injectors, he concluded something was wrong with the pump.  So while the guys were able to fix the pump (despite Dave’s early protest that it wouldn’t be field serviceable) they couldn’t fix the compression issue that was likely the root cause.  So it had to go back into the shed still inoperative.

Over the course of the two days we laughed several times at the family dog who seemed content to run around the yard with a rope tied around his neck, dragging on the ground behind him.  None of the family seemed at all concerned about it, but it seemed very odd to us.

Domingo had gone across the bay in his panga to pick up his grand kids from school when we packed up our tools.  So he came out in his panga and brought us some fresh corn soup as a thank you for our efforts.  When we tasted it later it was sort of like watered down creamed corn.  Somewhere on his finca he grows the corn himself.  Dave explained to him that the fuel pump was fine now, but that he needed to have a mechanic come check the compression on the engine.  Unfortunately we will probably never know whether they get the unit fixed as it wasn’t apparent that Domingo had any email capabilities to tell us how this story ends.

As we were getting the boats ready to get underway a squall came through.  So we decided to sit it out at anchor as we weren’t crazy about maneuvering out of the bay in poor visibility.  And then it just kept coming.  Hours of rain, rain, rain.  We filled our whole 100 gallon water tank off the deck and it just kept coming.  So we plan to depart early in the morning.

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