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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Need Phasor genset thoughts
Posted By: Vic Roy
Date: Sunday, 26 June 2005, at 10:07 p.m.
Well, Faithful, before you go night-night, need your advice. AJ has a 5.5 KW Phasor mounted on a shelf outboard of the port engine. It's a 3 cyl. Kubota direct coupled, 1800 rpm installed new in about 1994, and been kept up good. Some more facts: fuel feed to it comes off a gate valve in the single 222 gal. tank pickup that is t'ed and also feeds the port 250 6BTA Cummins. Stb. Cummins has an identical gate valve off the same tank pickup, but is by itself. Both Cummins and the genset have their own Racor 500 filters (yeah, I know, the 500 is overkill for the genset, but why carry different filters?) Genset has run flawlessly for years. Yes, we have checked every hose clamp on both the intake and return line sides.
So here is the sordid tale for you to brain-tease: Week before last, just before the UVI, the impeller in the genset raw water pump blows up and I don't have a spare on board, (dumb, but even careful humans make oversights) so order new ones, pay big premium to get them overnight, wrong ones, do it again, right ones won't pump water, but genset starts fine. So I jury rig a Jabsco flex impeller 120 v. pump to supply the raw water to the heat exchanger, just took the impeller out of the engine driven pump and plumbed the Jabsco to the raw water intake and output to the HE (engine driven raw water pump is out of the loop) and it worked perfect. Way more water volume than the Oberhausen (sp?) gear driven pump on the genset, but was careful to make sure the genset was started and ran a little while before plugging in the Jabsco to keep from blowing water in the exhaust manifold, and vice versa, would disconnect the Jabsco and let the genset clear out the exhaust water before shutting it down. Worked perfect all day Sat., Sunday on the long 130 n.m. run down to Port Eads from the camp, all day offshore Monday, then Tuesday morning the genset would not fire - cranked fine, no fire.
Drained the Racor 500, new element, checked and changed o-rings. There is an electric in-line fuel pump between the tank and genset Racor, and it would pump the Racor full in no time. Also the electric will pump to the puny mechanical lift pump on the engine right up to the air bleed screw on it, but we cracked all 3 injector nuts and could not get any feul out of the injectors. Let it sit for a while (yes, we shot it with ether too) Tuesday afternoon and it started - without ether - and after it settled out, put the cooling water pump in operation. Ran fine for 20 minutes then quit. Noticed Monday morning the port Cummins (on that common gate valve out of the common tank pickup) took a few starter cycles to catch, when it usually fires instantly.
My crack Port Eads diesel mechanic crew - Mikey Kennedy, Carter Fourrier, and some advice from The Professor - could not get it to fire. No question it is getting clean fuel to the injector pump - or let me modify that, at least to the air bleed on the little mechanical pump right by the injector pump - but no dice out of the cracked injector nuts. It almost seems like there might be another filter (a screen type maybe?) that we are missing, and of course, the manual with the Kubota engine is worthless in detail stuff.
What ya'll think? I already got my money on something screwed up in the injector pump, but let's find an easy solution. Blown diaphram in the puny mechanical lift pump? I saw no rise on the oil dipstick, no diesel smell in the Mobil 1 motor oil.
Don't rest your head on the pillow before you figure this out. I'm going on vacation all week with the family and won't rest until I get this fixed.
UV
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