Remember the "WVO damaged " 1987 TD on craigslist a while back?
 

I bought it. I was curious what went wrong with it. Plus I could use about $1000 in parts right off the bat on my cars. It has an Elsbett single tank system that had been run for 45,000 miles about using a good amount of oil over those miles -- 50 to 70 % . It has lots of new parts and maintenance records. The seller said he thought it needed a ring job or engine rebuild and had lots of blow by. It came with 150 gallons of oil and his vegetable oil filtering system.

I went and picked it up with my father in law in his 6.5 Turbo diesel and drove it almost all the way home from Durum, NC to Nashville, TN. For a car with a blown engine it sure ran well. It started right up in dead cold after first short glow. Smoked a lot of white smoke until warm and bumped around a bit as it has bad motor mounts. However it drives good and climbed the mountains at 60 mph in 3rd gear.
I hit a top speed of 90 mph without trouble and it outran the 6.5 Chevy Turbo diesel pulling the tow dolly and loaded with 1500 lbs in bed.

The main problem was it used a lot of oil , either leaking it or burning it. However once warm it doesn't smoke. It used about 3/4 to 1 gal. of oil throughout the whole 600 mile drive. Haven't looked at it to see where its leaking.

Also another symptom was when you would try to accelerate over 60 mph you had to feather the pedal. If you punched it or gave it to much fuel, it would bog down, like there was a fuel restriction somewhere or the IP was throttling the fuel down somehow , not like the hesitation you get with a clogged fuel filter h-h-h-hes-hesitat-ion. So you had to ease the pedal down and gently accelerate to 70, 80 and 90. But it would go. This problem fixed itself after me driving it hard over a few hundred miles and blowing out lots of smoke. I topped it off with 12 gal. of biodiesel B50 and kept giving it Italian tune ups. Now you can floor it at 60 mph and it will downshift to 3rd and take off without hardly blowing any black smoke.

The wvo system was fine except i noticed they T'd into the coolant for the heat exchanger before the auxillary water pump, not after it. This caused that fuel heater to stay cold for a long long time. After 30 minutes of idling and driving, long after the engine was warm, that heater was still only luke warm. T in after the aux water pump and the pump pushes coolant to the veg heater rather than suck it away from it. That heater will get hot as soon as coolant is warm usually. Also, he wasn't making use of the built in heater as the thermostat was not bypassed. That is free heat.

His vegetable oil was top quality. Mostly soy oil but it was clean and not even cloudy at 40F or so. That's what you want. He was filtering to 1 micron through a hand pump and a big water filtration filter housing like you have under your house. His good oil is what made the engine last as long as it did given the poor heating. Just speculating. If you run vegoil you should definitely make sure your heaters are working and the oil is getting hot asap.

Attached are some pics. The body is not rusted out underneath at all. No holes in spare tire or tool compartments. It has the trailer hitch and wiring. Exhaust muffler is new. It has a bit of surface rust in places but nothing major. Overall, it has 275,000 miles on it and looks like a car that has been well used and still would give great utility for 20 more years. I would classify it as a nice beater that could have every dent and scratch fixed if you really wanted to but is perfect as is for family road trips camping and canoing. Plenty respectable. The sunroof and a couple windows don't work which is a bit of a problem.

I'm going to do a compression test and check injectors and glow plugs and see where the oil leak is coming from asap. I'll keep you all posted. If the oil leak is fixable without pulling the engine and engine is ok or anyone wants to save this car from being parted out, send me a PM or email.

Alastair has a thread on here somewhere about slowly dribbling h2o into problematic WVO engines and cleaning them out. He's had at least one notable success with that method of cleaning things up. Might be worth a try.

Might also try adding some solvent to the cylinders to free up the rings.

-Jason

what are you asking for the car?

Pics dont come through in much detail, but looks like a nice car. I am interested in parts if it goes that way.

John, back away from the keyboard.... :D

(something tells me that you're not married! no wife would put up with that many cars)

My wife might be interested. Price? Bike rack included?

To clear the ring I use a wallpaper stripper/ steamer. I plug it in the manifold, let he car iddle for a wee while, then rev a bit, then iddle again.
To be honest I am not sure if it work but I do it as a maintenance as I am pretty confident it do some cleaning. The steam is coming out the exhaust.
The idea of the wallpaper was from a member of the veg site, I think it good. Take a wee while tho to go through 5 litre of water.
Or as posted above, the H2O injection is the best.

Yes, Kerry--I did write a post Somewhere about that.

--I Think it was over on STD, 'He Who Shall Not Be Named' was argueing with me about it....:rolleyes:

He got me banned this week from there--for disagreeing with him....:mad:

Anyway, the upshot of that old post was to use Water-Injection to clean any stuck-rings caused by VO. A number of guys have had issues with the later Multi-valver 505 and 606 engines so bad with ring-gumming to cause the oil to be forced out of the dip-stick hole!

50 miles of water-Injection completely cured the mega-excess blow-by good enough to be able to measure a Negative crank-case pressure under full power--and not just on one or two engines. Ive heard about 6 or 7 that have been 'repaired' this way....:D

Worth trying before tearing into it!:D

she wants one like mine

Thats what I want to do. I didn't see any major oil leaks under the car. Oil cooler lines are good. IP leaks a little oil but that is normal. No huge streaks of oil out the back. So it may be burning it. I would have thought there would be more smoke though.

It does have a good bit of blow by out the top. It shakes the oil cap good . I compared it with my other wagon with 132,000 -- the cap doesn't even move.

I'll be searching but in case i can't find it could you tell me where the water injection how to is ? What is STD?

Thanks.

Bike rack didn't come with it. I'll have to see how the engine is. Some one was right on pics. They are low res , seller's pics . The ones I was sent. It looks better in pics but not much. Not a bad ride. Actually damn good ride. Suspension is great. new ball joints up front , shocks good. Ride height nice. New tie rod on left side.

Anyone notice the goofy seat belts in back seat? Lap belts only that don't match the other seat belts. Anyone seen those before? Seller said he's seen that in a lot of em. I'm wondering if that was a hold over from the W123 wagons or if this seat was pulled from a W123 wagon.

Not original seatbelts, he hasn't seen any of them unless someone local to him is retrofitting 3rd seats and stuffing lap-belts in them. The originals are as you'd expect, 3-point belts.

Biopete, if this works there should follow a link to discussion about water injection to cure stuck rings. I've only run into this on the turbocharged 606 engines, but as you've got a single tank system that apparently wasn't generating sufficient heat to the WVO that may well be the issue you've got, too. 40 highway miles or so with a mist of water (preferably after the turbocharger but so long as it's a fine mist you should be fine having it ahead of the turbo once) seems to do the trick. I went ahead and installed a water injection kit (about $250.00 for everything) that mists water/methanol (aka windshield washer fluid) into the chargeair pipe on the E300's. 15,000 plus miles since the install and no more oil fountain under the hood.

http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/forum/viewthread.php?tid=15095&page=1#pid161311

..you might have to cut and paste the "link" into your browser.

Good luck!

If the engines good, I would be interested in the car. I have a 3rd baby due and have been looking for a 7 passenger car. Plus I'm only 2 hours away from you!