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Old 11-15-2004, 12:38 PM
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JamesStein JamesStein is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Tallahassee, FL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim B+
the plugs have glow-cycled once is some kind of safety device built into the system, to possibly prevent you from starting the car after the pre-glow has gone "cold"...maybe to prevent "flooding" or some other interruption of the sequence...until you start over again. This happens to me ever so often, and it has the "feel" of a protective device rather than a malfunction.

You are correct, its by design. But I doubt it has anything to do with the glowplugs since the ingition is the same in both the diesels and the gassers. I would wager that its to prevent you from engaging the starter if your engine is already running.

If you were to take apart the ignition switch (the electrical portion) and look at the housing that it sits in you'd see a series of groves. Oddly, dispite the large amount of pictures I've taken of the guts of one of these things, I don't have one of that. Perhaps I'll take one when I get back home. In this picture of the actual mechanism inside the switch you can see a lever with a pin on the end. That pin rides in the groove in the housing and causes the lever to be moved out when you turn the key into the 'start' position or actually just a hair past the 'glow' position. That lever then blocks the ignition from going back into the start position.
Attached Thumbnails
Ignition key does not work all the time-ignition-switch-guts.jpg  
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'84 300CD Turbo 132k (Anthracite Grey) - WVO - My daily driver - Recently named coo-coo-coupe by my daughter.
'84 300D Turbo 240k (Anthracite Grey) - Garage Queen
'83 300D Turbo 220k (Orient Red) - WVO - Wifes daily driver

I'm not a certified mechanic, but I did stay at a HolidayInn Express last night.
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