306 D Turbo Starts on 3 Cyliners

Okay this one is confusing me now. Seen a few posts saying the same thing.

Car starts and runs very lumpy with what seems like only 3 cylinders firing. This is accompanied by black and white smoke which gives and sort of grey as the mix. A few seconds and it clears and all is fine, alternatively blip the throttle and it clears. It always clears with a puff of black smoke. The cold makes the situation worse.

I have replaced all the glowplugs but still suffer from the problem. Car is a 95 with 84K miles on the clock.

I suspected worn injectors but have been adviced to get a compression test. Spoke to local garage and they say there is no point as if it were low compression it would run on 3 cyliners constanly (not so sure about that).

Here is the starnge thing, I have found (purely by accident) that if I give the priming pump a couple of pumps before I cold start it, the problem does not seem to occur. I get a tiny bit of smoke, but it does not run on 3 cylinders. What does this suggest? Injector pump?

Don't know where else to go with this one, so any help would be much appreciated. Using the process of elimination on this sort of thing can be expensive, time consuming and inconclusive, so any suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks all in advance, Adam

Reply to
adamc
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Symptoms are as for duff glowplug(s). Priming the pump to cure it suggests fuel leakage. Odd. DaveK.

Reply to
davek

Reply to
MICHAEL ROCHE

Have you checked that the glow plugs actually glow i.e. that the cable connection to every glow plug is working?

Reply to
daddyfreddy

Thanks for this Dave, pretty interesting. I am going to have a general hunt round the whole fuel system for a possible leak, but was wondering how I can check the seals in the priming bulb? Should I remove the tank side pipe and see if I get diesel flowing back out of it?

Reply to
adamc

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