Car Trouble The Aftermath

My last post ended with our disabled car parked outside our apartment complex, unable to start and with us having no idea what was wrong with it. This one ends on a much better note, since although there is still one issue to fix, we yesterday did a 700km round trip without any significant issues.

The problem with the car turned out to be the cambelt. It seems that a small piece of the fraying alternator belt broke off and wedged in the cambelt, snapping it. A broken cambelt is a very serious thing, which is why people are (or should be) so careful about making sure they are replaced on time. We were fairly lucky since the geometry and general solidness of our engine meant that the damage was confined to a couple of bent valves. Gopal spent a few days at the garage replacing the valves, the cambelt and the alternator belt and everything was like new.

With new valves, the car now sounds exactly like a brand new engine, which is not exactly a good thing in a diesel car. It sounds a bit like a sewing machine! That will settle down though as the valves wear in. And the need to make a round trip to Guntur, some 300km from Hyderabad was an excellent opportunity to help them do that. The trip was relatively uneventful (I'll write more about it later), except for two small issues:

1. A stone flicked up from another car dislodged the plastic tray under the engine (which probably hadn't been screwed in properly by the boys at the garage), so we had to stop and remove it.
2. We "ran out of fuel" again (so we thought). Last time, we had concluded there must be a problem with the fuel gauge to run out of diesel with a quarter of a tank remaining. This time, we ran out when it said just under half a tank. The fuel issue happened on the way home, when we had just joined the queue to go through a toll plaza. We stopped and when the queue moved, our car didn't. The engine stalled and wouldn't start again. We were in the right hand lane, so I got out and helped push the car across 5 lanes of traffic to the left edge of the road. After a quick check to confirm the engine itself was fine, Gopal got a lift to the nearest petrol station with a passing guy on a scooter. The car started fine after adding 3 litres of diesel, so we drove straight to the petrol bunk to fill up.

The tank was full after only another 22 litres. So adding 25 litres in a 47 litre tank meant that at the time we had "run out", there was still 22 litres in the tank. That meant the problem was actually in getting the fuel from the tank to the engine, not that we were actually out of fuel altogether. Our current hypothesis is that there is a crack or hole in the pipe that takes the fuel out of the tank which means that when the tank is still nearly half full. At that point, it starts sucking air and the engine dies. We'll confirm that and get it fixed in the next day or two, but thankfully at least, the engine is now fine! Hopefully that means some travel is in our future.