I have posted a while ago that my car, an 84 300SD with a VO conversion kit would no longer start (the thread was lost in the hard drive crash last month). I tried a few things that I will post later but was unsuccessful in my attempts. I'm getting to the point that I want to know what killed my car. If it can be fixed along the way that's a bonus.

I have just the last few days found 3 more cars with similar symptoms as mine had when it was still running. The symptoms were:
- poor idle or not able to idle on diesel (fine, even good on VO)
- white smoke (only confirmed in one other car)
- severe loss of power on diesel (probably on VO, too, but much less so it seemed great in comparison)

The cars are 300SDs: 84 (mine, Greasecar, self-installed), 82 (home-made conversion), 83 (Greasecar, by authorized Greasecar installer) and a 300D wagon (around 82, Greasel). The wagon died some time during the summer.

I have thought for a while that the Greasecar kits don't supply a lot of heat for the engine to be ok in the long run with the temperatures in Massachusetts and could cause trouble because of it in the long run. Greasel is worse from looking at the parts of their system. I don't know what temperature the fuel actually gets to but the heat exchange system doesn't look beefy enough on either system.

Does anyone have similar experience or know of other cases? Or maybe insights as to what could be the cause and/or the fuel heating issue described above?

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84 300SD with Greasecar vegetable oil kit. Boston, MA