Have a day off here in Providence. My bus is running great, because, I expect, its cool enough that I've never needed the engine fan to run on high. It stays right around half of the RPM speed. Is that normal? When I had hotwired it on my last trip, I thought my wire did nothing. It ran to a switch that was grounded on the other pole. Was I supposed to run it to power instead? Nothing happened when I flipped the switch, but that's when the fan started running at higher speeds all the time - usually about 70% of RPM.

When I didn't get the pigtail replaced before I left, I took that hotwire off, and got the wires separated well, so they're not shorting. And, now the fan is back to running at 50%, so I guess my wire was doing something. I wonder how I make it actually go from 50% to the higher mode with the hotwire, instead of this either/or wireon/wireoff thing.

Next tpic, sSo, I may not have scored on the shuttle I bought at the auction last week. The driver I hired to take it to storage says it's blowing a lot of smoke, "grey, like diesel, smells like diesel." Since he doesn't seem to know anything about diesels, not sure what that means. Otherwise, he says it runs fine, and if it was him, he'd drive it to Texas. Hmmm.

Obviously, if it's burning oil or coolant, I won't be driving it to Texas. But, maybe it's just fuel from a stuck EGR or bad sensor? Any ideas? I gotta go up there and make a decision fast on a course of action. What are possible sources of grey smoke?

 

That's a good question, I always say blue/gray is oil, black is fuel and white is coolant, so depending on how much smoke you might have a problem, or just be burning off something and it needs a good run to sort it out.

 

Yeah, I didn't know what to make of the color comment. I was more hopeful that he said it smelled like diesel, hard to mistake that. And that suggests overfueling, maybe an easier fix.

Wonder if it might be fuel in the exhaust pipe, although it woulda burned out over the 12 miles he drove it..

 

If it is significant over-fueling, sometimes you can identify which cylinder by looking at the exhaust manifold flanges and seeing if you see any fuel seepage at one of them.

 

Not sure how well I can see those on this Eseries, but good to know. I also recall my trucks smoking from having a bad fuel filter, although they didn't "run fine" when they did.