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By: George Reiswig - 8/2002

From Atlin up to Whitehorse

arts were supposed to arrive on Friday, to avoid a delay over the long weekend. Gaskets shipped FedEx, and cylinder head coming via UPS, we arrived on Friday morning hoping that the parts would be there.

UPS and FedEx don't serve Whitehorse. We were told this bit of cheery news by a local who seemed to know, and who also added that they would probably pass the parcels off to a local courier in Vancouver who might get it on a truck early next week.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I started making phone calls to UPS and FedEx, neither of whom seemed to know exactly where our packages were. Explaining my frustration over the phone seemed to help somehow, as both packages suddenly appeared at the shop simultaneously about an hour after I'd started making threats to shippers who had guaranteed shipment at a certain day and time but who had (until that point) not lived up to their end of it.

No worries, though -- here they were. Upon opening up the crate that the head was in, I discovered that the bolt that held it to the crate had damaged the mating surface, necessitating some additional time and money to get the head machined flat again.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Fortunately, a good machinist was available and willing to do the work.

So... you probably could do without the bitter details of the next two days, wrestling cylinder heads on and off, torquing bolts, and so forth. Suffice it to say that we verified that the timing was WAY off (kudos to Ron, who was right on the money when he said we were probably timed at 38-49 degrees BTDC). We replaced the head. We changed oil. We changed oil again. We fired it up. It ran. It still runs. We drove it to Skagway on Sunday the 18th. Boy, it's nice to have my diesel back! Grog feels better than he has since I had the fuel pump work done, the torque curve now extending down into the low RPMs like it is supposed to.