glow plugs

[JLDickmon]

my beast is getting to the point I have to glow the motor three or four times to get it started in the morning - then it coughs up a cloud of white smoke

doesn't do it if it sits all day at work, just after it's been cool in the evenings...

heaps got about 85K on it... anyone else find glow plugs failing this early?

 

[jvencius]

my beast is getting to the point I have to glow the motor three or four times to get it started in the morning - then it coughs up a cloud of white smoke

doesn't do it if it sits all day at work, just after it's been cool in the evenings...

heaps got about 85K on it... anyone else find glow plugs failing this early?

If you feel like throwing money at it, try swapping out the GPR first. IIRC, I spent ~$45 on mine at the IH dealer and it's a whole helluva lot easier to change the GPR than the GP's.

How old are your batteries? Old/weak batts can make starting kind of iffy and maybe that's what's contributing to what's going on...

 

[95_stroker]

JV mentions some good points, I'll see if I can add to it. You can ohm out the GP's to see if they are bad. If you take the UVC harness plug apart I think the GP's are the outer pins on each plug, the inner pins go to the injector solenoid. Excessively high ohms creates more resistance and results in a bad GP, conversely, zero ohms indicates an open GP (broke). A perfect GP will read out at .2 ohms. High is anything over 1 ohm and low obviously is 0.

If you dont want to buy a GPR or think yours isnt bad, one way to test it is take a set of jumper cables and using a common lead (ie, red/red) hook it to the two large terminals on the GPR, let it sit for 30-60 seconds and then hit the key while its still jumped.

 

[roosterdiesel]

Check out my thread from last fall when I had similar issues. I was at about 90k miles.

STARTING ISSUES THREAD

 

[JLDickmon]

I finally got sick of farting around with it in the mornings... took my test light and was probing the GPR... noticed that I had no power OUT of the relay when energized... thought, ok.. relays fail...

Called Ford and had them bring a new relay over, went to unbolt the old one, got to the output side of the high-amp coil.. touched a wrench to the nut and was holding the cable in my hand... the bakelite had failed and the terminal fell out of the GPR...

that explains why it would only goof off on humid days... darn thing was getting water inside it...

here's a picture of it...

what would happen, is when you would put a test light against the terminal itself, to check for power, I was actually pushing down on the terminal and it was making contact... when I would check for power at the glow plugs themselves, there wasn't any.

I was taking off the heavy cable to do a continuity test on it, and when I touched the wrench on the nut, the whole caboodle came apart...

Moral of the Story is: take apart your connections to check power THROUGH a device...

 

[dMerre89]

yeh mine used to smoke it got so bad... almost melted the lead wire from the battery