What a great way to spend fathers day weekend.
Some of you know that my son Scott bought a Scenicruiser PD 4501-805, and that he and I were going to make the trek north of Chicago this last weekend to try to get it so that it can be driven home. We loaded everything we could think of that we might possibly need into his MCI and headed North. From what we can tell it last ran about 5 years ago. Prior to that we think that it had a NEW engine and transmission installed some 10 years earlier, then went from Texas to somewhere on the east coast (Connecticut ?) and didn't go much of anywhere until it was hauled to Illinois. It also had the floor lowered at the same time. A lot of it's history after it left Texas is pretty hazy, I would love to have the whole story.
This is what we were greeted with when we arrived Friday evening.
We had no expectations of getting it done in one weekend, but hoped to get it running. Friday we didn't have much time to do anything. Saturday morning we set about checking the countless things needed to resurrect an engine that hadn't run for years. Scott did a quick check on the batteries and they checked bad so we pulled them out. We had planned on pulling one out of the MCI for the weekend. I suggested that he check them individually and would you believe one showed that it had 12v and might be usable? We used that one all weekend?
Since the wiring to the front looks like this.
The plan is to get it running from the rear. There is mechanical oil pressure and water temp gauges in the rear. We went about checking ,greasing and making sure we would "do no harm" to anything. Had to close front heater loop. We wired a switch to the emergency stop solenoid, it doesn't seem quite strong enough to pull against the pressure exerted by the spring. We pulled the valve covers to check movement of the rack. That has to be the cleanest I have ever seen the inside of a diesel that has run. Also pulled the throttle cable and greased it. Scott cleaned out the oil bath air cleaners there are 4 of them, what a mess, better him than me.
We discovered that the fuel tank had virtually nothing in it. Not sure why, possibly former owner had siphoned fuel to run his tractor? Fortunately I have friends who live near by and one offered to bring 50 gallons of fuel down. He finally showed up at midnight. Many thanks to Bill.
While we were waiting, we addressed other problems, like no driver floorboard or pedals. It ain't pretty, but it works.
Sunday morning we felt we were ready to try to start the engine. After much "getting that really nasty, what IS that stuff" out of the feel system and much bleeding of things, we got it to fire. We had oil pressure just cranking. I am convinced that we are "this" close,
just haven't gotten enough good fuel up to the injectors yet.
So with heavy hearts, we headed home late Sunday afternoon. We were hoping to get thing aired up to evaluate the air system and brakes. We are off again this coming weekend to try again, armed with things we discovered we didn't have.
Still we had a very productive weekend.
Wish us luck
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