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By: George Reiswig - 8/2002
The next morning, I phoned the shop in Watson Lake. Mercedes makes trucks? Never even seen that engine. Wouldn't know how to fix it. Well... would you be willing to explain that to our insurance company? Yep.
I had also called the good people at Prince George Truck & Equipment, where Ken Schultz was just as surprised as I to learn that we were down again. I had taken off the cylinder head to determine whether the crack was in the head, block, or gasket, and to my surprise it was the gasket that had failed, after a mere 600 miles! The cracks in the head looked to still be intact, but cracks are cracks, and I had a new puzzle on my hands: what would cause the head gasket to fail so soon? Moreover, 5 of the 6 cylinders showed damage to the gasket seals around the bores. Why a gasket failure? Is this something that can be fixed AT ALL???!
Nooooooooooooooooooo!
 |
| We no longer had the luxury of working directly with PGT&E... but we spent a lot of time on the phone with them. |
I discussed it with Ken, who was just as puzzled. I'd followed the retorquing procedures diligently. What could be the problem? We just didn't know. This made it all the more important to me to ship the truck home, but our insurance company wasn't cooperating.
Meanwhile, Charlie had hitched a ride (no public transportation available from Dease Lake to anywhere, really) up to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, and rented a Ford Explorer. His adventure is best told by him, and I will try to persuade him to write it up. At any rate, he drove the eight hours back to Dease Lake to pick us up so that we would be able to get to wherever, whether Grog was towed, shipped, or sold. Fred and Jane wisely left us after helping us as much as they could, thinking that our trip was over and that they should continue with theirs. They were destined to go to Tok, then on to visit a cousin of Jane's elsewhere in Alaska.
Later that day, Ken called me back. He had asked around, including a conversation with Ron, the local fuel injection specialist who is quite familiar with the fuel pump in our trucks. When Ken told him how we had verified (not changed) the timing on the injection pump, Ron told him that it was wrong. What? How could that be? The manual calls for drips that signify start of delivery to occur at 23 degrees before Top Dead Center, and we verified that by turning the crankshaft and watching for the drips. It certainly looked like the shop in Portland, who had set up the pump before, had done it right.
Ron was insistent: fuel flow does NOT signify start of delivery in these pumps. All it means is that the pump is filling with fuel in preparation to deliver a pulse. According to him, it is when the fuel flow STOPS that the injection pulse is starting.
Some e-mails to Eric Johnson and Kai Serrano (Thank you, gentlemen!), other Unimog owners who have this model, verified Ron's story. The Portland shop had timed the engine at the wrong end of the no-flow window, and instead of being timed to inject at 23 degrees before, it was injecting at 23 degrees plus however many degrees the pulse takes to complete -- in this case Ron was confident that it was timed at 38 or 40 degrees. This would certainly explain the head gasket failure. Even with this smoking gun evident, we still felt that perhaps we should just ship the truck home and deal with it there. If the insurance company would help us out, that is...
Another call to the insurance company, who had already had to pay a few hundred dollars in no-show charges for their earlier cancellation of plans. Charlie had talked to the guy at the car rental place, who just happened to have a shop, too. We persuaded the insurance company that we could fix the vehicle there, so they towed us up to Whitehorse. Total cost was $300 more than it would have cost them to ship it to Oregon. But they stuck by their policy, by gum!
I found a NOS cylinder head in Ontario, and ordered a new gasket set. All of this was shipped at the most expensive, fastest rate possible to the shop in Whitehorse. This meant that it would get there in several days, hopefully on the Friday before the long holiday weekend (Discovery Day!).
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