Well, not everything is rosy in turbo land, sportsfans. I got in the truck to go home from work Thursday night, and the wait to start light went out after about 7 seconds, and the voltmeter needle was swinging rapidly left and right. Uh-Oh - I know what that means - at least one glow plug has died an early death. I had put in new gp's during the turbo install. Fortunately, it was about 35° out so the truck started okay, but ran like crap until the cold cylinder finally started firing. Anybody care to guess which plug went dead? Of course, you just knew it had to be No. 7 under the turbo. Well, it took me a couple of hours, and combination of 1/4" drive extensions, u-joint and magnetic pickup, but I got it changed out without having to pull the turbo. I gotta tell ya though, that is not an easy job! That did the trick though - I have full GP burn time again. I also found that the return caps on 1 and 3 were weeping, so took care of that while I was in there (hopefully). Even though maintenance operations such as these are way more complicated with the turbo on there, I still would not go back to N/A!
at an ambient air temp of 5 below. It also did not appear to pulsing the plugs after the initial burn. It seemed to give the plugs full burn for 6 seconds again right after the initial burn. This observation is based on watching the voltmeter needle. The new controller does about a 14 second initial burn at 5 below air temp and then will slowly pulse the plugs on and off. We will see if this controller change lengthens glow plug life. My question is: what typically fails on these controllers when this happens? Is it the electronic components in the board under the relay?
