Hello everyone, I hope someone can help me.
I have a grand voyager 2001 owned for about 2 years, a great car with no problems at all. However, about a week ago when I tried to start it one morning, I had thick clouds of white/grey smoke from the exhaust and the engine was really struggling to start(almost like it was missfiring or a cylinder had gone).
Not wanting to do any damage, I left the car and called my local garage who came to have a look. The mechanic tried it and said it smelt of diesel. He then revved it reasonably high and most of the smoke cleared (there was still a small amount visable). he seemed happy that it was probably ok but to be safe I asked them to take it in and have a look.

They have checked the glow plugs, injectors and replaced vacuum hose to egr solenoid which was worn all checked out ok

Once I recieved the car back all seemed ok except it sounded like a 20 year old diesel taxi when accelerating (very growly and loose) but performed fine and no smoke. But in the morning when I started it up the problem returned. Once the car has warmed up things seem better but the garage has now given up as they have no ideas.

the car was serviced 2 months ago and has been up until last week. It started fine all through our very cold spell recently but seems related to the car cooling or sitting static.

Any help would be fantastic

Nick

 

that should read the car was serviced 2 months ago and has been fine up until last week.....sorry

 

white smoke, runs fine when warmed up, exhaust smells diesel....
change the glow plugs and make sure they have proper power suplly.

 

White smoke was run for cause of coolant or water coming out the tail pipe.When your car is overheated the head gasket shrunk and quit into the combustion chamber.So you would to replaced and refurced exhaust system.So your car is run better than previously.

 

no
when his engine warms up, there is no smoke.
not true.
gaskets do not srunk.
nothing to do with exhaust.
it's the engine that produces smoke, not exhaust.

 

I suspect paulmartin is perhaps not English and is using a translation tool such as Babelfish, forgive me if this is an incorrect assumption. Anyhow what he is trying to allude to is that white smoke in the morning CAN (I am not saying is) be due to a head gasket or even a cracked head where overnight coolant seaps into the combustion chamber. However in this case the smoke will typically smell of GlycolEther.

Diesel's are compression ignition and work on the principle that if you compress air anything over 16:1 it gets very hot. Towards the top of the compression stroke diesel is injected into this hot air and as a result of the heat it combusts forcing the piston down. Now first thing in the morning the engine is very cold and a great deal of the heat contained within the compressed air is lost into the cylinder bores due to conduction. As such normal road going cars use glowplugs to provide a little heat kick to help the process on its way. Once the engine has warned it retains sufficient heat during the day for the combustion process to work normally.

Now a couple of things can cause starting problems in the morning.

1. Faulty glowplugs
2. Insufficient current delivery to glowplugs
3. Incorrect injection pump timing on indirect injection engines
4. Leaking injectors - seaping more diesel into the combustion chamber overnight than the combustion process can deal with. Some pressure is retained in the pump system even after the engine stops running.
5. Loss of compression due to either worn rings/bore, sticking valves/incorrect valve clearances or a head gasket that is on its way out.
6. Worn valve stem seals - this causes engine oil to seap into the combustion chamber but this still causes combustion issues due to compromising the air/fuel ratio. If this is the case the smoke, in addition to smelling of diesel, will have a blueish tint to it.

If it only does it on very cold mornings then I would suspect 1, 2 and perhaps 6.

 

well, it's very hard to mistake "shrunk" with any other word.
and like I said, gaskets do not shruk. or better, they do, but not as much to cause failure.
in this case, bad gasket would cause even greater driving and smoke problems when engine warms up. that's due to the fact that everything expands when heated. and a bad head gasket would show some more effects then just morning white smoke.

for the rest, I agree

since Nick Owen had this problem all of a sudden, I would roule out worn cylinder and rings.
also leaking injectors, cause that would make a lot of black smoke on startup.
that leaves partially bad glow plugs and wiring to them.
final step (and most expencive one) would be to check high pressure pump.

one more thing (maybe you know that).
what you said about loosing heat in the cold mornings.
that's the common problem for all diesels, but small engines are effected much more then the big ones (I mean, big as to the cylinder volume). the bigger the volume of the cylinder, heat loss is smaller (due to the area - volume ratio).
so, big engines like that 2,8 can start with one or even two glow plugs dead. and starting problem then just appears one morning when it's too cold for them or the third glow plug stops.

 

Hey Nick. One more thing that I should have thought of. I had this same problem on my first Voyager and it turned out to be corrosion on the glowplug relays. I just took then out, sprayed some electrical contact cleaner (from Maplins) in the sockets and them pushed them in and out a few more times to burnish the contacts and hey presto problem solved.

 

Hi Guys, thanks for taking the time to leave such considered and thorough responses.
You've all given me alot to think about and so now I have found a bit of time to work things through have a thought I'd like to put to you.

The garage assures me that the new growling/rumbling noise during acceleration is caused by some sort of fuel/ignition problem that in my mind is obviously linked to the main problem as they started at the same time. As my first thoughts were that one cylinder may not have been firing properly or something similar, coupled with a great desctription on diesel combustion, and having read some other threads I was thinking that maybe there was a slight lack of fuel? assuming that if there was not quite enough fuel in a cylinder then when it took it's turn to combust that there would not be enough to make it happen efficiently hence the rumble and unburnt diesel in exhaust?

I had read somewhere else on this site about a lift pump ( I assume this is the pump that lifts fuel from the tank to the engine. So I turned the key enough to kick the pump into action, and found that it seems to be alot noisier than usual. I can only describe it as sounding similar to a water pump that is running without water in it ( all goes alot quieter and smoother when water is added). I did this twice prior to starting the car by leaving it to run until it stopped. I then tried to start the car from that point and it would not kick off at all. So then I tried to start it while pump was running and it started first time with alot less smoke too. It still took about a minute of just letting the engine rumble away (sounding / acting like it was not firing on a cylinder) for the engine to settle down and act normally. I'm no mechanic but am a telecoms engineer so have a reasonably good mind for methodical fault finding and really don't think it's a major problem with the car.

Could any of you fine people offer any thoughts on my possibly naive conclusion.

Thanks again for your great support
Nick

 

What area of telecoms voice or data ??

Anyhow white smoke means too much diesel so whilst I cannot say whether or not you have a pump issue I can say with a degree of certainty that diesel is definitely getting to the engine there is just insufficient heat to ignite it when cold or the mixture is simply too rich for the compression/glow plugs to handle. If it were your pump I would expect it to happen all the time. Have you checked your ECU for any codes.

Turn your car to the point where the mileage shows. Then switch it to run then back to mileage 3 times ending on run and then take a look at the mileage display you should after a few seconds see some P *** codes appear e.g. P1130