This weekend was Travelall-focused, mainly, because I wanted to get her running properly now that Peer Pressure is stored at Brian’s house. The engine was running but bogging down on acceleration, which pointed me back to water being in the gas, so the first thing I did was disconnect the fuel pump, point it into a bucket, and let it run for a minute. When that gas had settled, there was indeed water at the bottom, so I started draining the tank into buckets again. collecting about 7 gallons and filtering it through an old T-shirt into another bucket. By the time the gas ran clear I had about half a pint of water collected, which certainly would explain the issues I was having. With that done, I mixed in a half a bottle of HEET and replaced the gas, then ran the pump again to make sure there wasn’t any more water. Then I took her for a test drive. The stumble was gone and she ran well, but the idle was very high.
I plugged in my garage-sale engine tester and vacuum gauge and brought the idle screw way down to hover at about 700RPM, which is a much happier place to be. On the second test drive, she ran like a dream. I took her for a longer trip but found that my brake issue is back: longer trips heat the drums up, which tells me there’s a blockage in the lines somewhere. This is puzzling because I’ve replaced all of the soft lines—usually in cases like this a soft line has swelled internally so that when pressure is applied it’s forced through the blockage but doesn’t have enough power to go back the other way. So I’ve got to figure out what’s going on there.
While I was waiting on the tank to drain, I sprayed the engine bay of the 800 with oven cleaner and hit it with the pressure washer. When I was done I’d blasted about five pounds of dirt and grease off of the truck, and found that I could see the firewall, engine block, and suspension clearly for the first time. Another thing I’d done during last week was to take one of my spare valve covers, wire wheel it, and spray it with IH Implement Red. After replacing the original, the engine bay looks 13% less redneck.
With the engine a little cleaner, I pulled the truck forward and drained the oil. It came out black with a little water at the bottom—but this could have been from me spraying it with the PCV valve open. I took a sample for Blackstone Labs, pulled the cartridge-style oil filter off (first time I’ve ever dealt with one of these) and put a new one in. Then I refilled it with Rotella diesel 10-W40. Hopefully that will help clean the engine out a bit.
I also pulled the driver’s tank out of the 800 last week to find it’s in slightly better shape than the passenger side, so I spent $12 on some fiberglass screen patches and a tube of TankWeld and started glooping it on the visible holes after wire-wheeling the edges. After two liquid tests I found I still had some pinholes, so I’ve got to keep working on it.
Meanwhile, here’s a recap video from two weeks ago: