Onan Diesel Generator was in a FLOOD! (Full of water) Will it run???

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] what's up everybody welcome back to diesel creek my name is matt this is a lovely diesel onan generator now before we get into that i know a lot of you already know that we had some pretty good flooding up here from the fallout from hurricane ida and this is going back a week already of course there's been entire towns and communities devastated by the flooding that's not a good thing personally we had some storage buildings flooded some of my tractors were underwater so that's why i look the way i do is because i've been spending days and days going through everything cleaning out basements and trying to get back from that but hold that aside this guy is the reason for today's video this was given to me by a local gentleman and he said he was going to scrap it if i didn't want it so you see where it's sitting so this is a 3-cylinder onan diesel attached to a 4kw generator head and i don't know much about what's going on with the angry pixies inside of the generator head but i do know a good bit about what's going on with the diesel so at the very least i think we'll get a running diesel out of this and the generator head i don't know water and electric motors and generators don't usually mix i'm thinking i should probably grease the bearings if nothing else but maybe everything's still good in here i really have no way of knowing that right now first things first let's uh give you guys a look at this thing so the gentleman gave me this thing and he told me that it was in a building that he had acquired some years ago and it was brand new the year before he bought the building and it was used to run refrigeration units in case the power would go out so he told me he barely ever used the thing in fact i don't even know if he told me he ever used the thing but it's just been sitting in his warehouse until yesterday when he pulled it out and put it on my truck the hour meter he claims is correct it reads 114 hours and one tenth so this thing isn't even broken in yet i had my elect chicken buddy tell me today that this thing should have no problem seeing 10 maybe even 20 000 hours on it and i thought that was a heck of a lot but he claims it's possible now as i said the entire unit was completely submerged for some time so i'm sure that this dipstick oh yeah yeah the oil's full up to the top of the dipstick hole so that means that the bottom of the crankcase is full of water which has floated the oil up to a level when it spews out so we're definitely going to have to drain the oil and i'm sure that we're going to find there's a lot more water in there than there is oil but the big problem with a diesel is you get water into the cylinders and then it hydrolocks on a gas job it's pretty easy to fix that all you do is take out the spark plug and turn it over it blows the water out of there and then once it's dried up enough you can throw the spark plug back in give it some fuel and it should fire right back up a diesel is a little bit tougher than that the easiest way i know to clear a hydrolock is we'll pull the valve cover off and adjust the exhaust valves so that they don't shut even when they're supposed to and that way we can make a full revolution and it'll force the water out the exhaust i did not check to see if this thing is hydra locked yet i haven't even checked to see if it turns over we're going gonna do all that together let's pull this air filter out as i'm oh yeah look at that huh that's a good seal on an air filter actually i'm pretty impressed that that's still holding water in there he also gave me the fuel tank to the unit it was completely full of water so he took it off and dumped it out well this thing is just full of surprises yep i'm thinking this filter is pretty well pooched i did run by the napa and pick up the oil filter and the air filter all right i picked up an oil filter this is not good folks oh that's a good sign right like this is freshly washed this is ready to go oh man i don't know the hours being 114 hours i don't know because this is a napa filter not a donaldson which i would have thought would have come with this thing so why would somebody have needed to replace this air filter within 114 hours especially being run in a building as a generator i don't know the story is unfolding before us folks you know i we have been flooded twice now in my lifetime and you know what i take away from the floods the most that i hate the smell afterwards and i was just talking to my buddy uh gerald over at the post-apocalyptic inventor channel and he lives in germany and they've been experiencing some flooding as well and he said the same thing which i thought was funny but this generator what would normally smell like diesel fuel and oil smells like moldy mud and just nastiness it's like it's a flood smell that's the only way i can describe it is that floods have their own unique smell of like stale nasty water they already opened up door number one with air filter you guys ready to see what's behind door number two look at that more water that ain't good we'll go ahead and get this oil drained now this thing is set up nicely to drain the oil off all you've got to do is open that little petcock right there and you've got this little flexible hose just hang it out the side here and drain our what i'm sure is mostly water so since oil is lighter than water what should happen here is i'm going to crack the drain valve open and all the water is going to come out clean first because this thing hasn't been run it's not like the oil and the water are going to mix so they should be clean separated in there and we're gonna wait till we start to see just a little drop of oil coming out with the water and then we'll shut it off and then i'm gonna go dump the water so that i don't dump all that water in my waste oil because i do use the waste oil for other things i don't like to have all the water in there there we go there we go oh it's like like beautiful spring water look at that oh yeah now we're actually getting a little bit of oil already you know what i think we're gonna let it fly there's not nearly as much water in this thing as i figured there would be [Music] so the good and bad of what we've learned from this oil change was that good is there wasn't as much water in the oil as i suspected there might be but the bad is that it was uh mixed with the oil more than i expected and i should have realized that because it's been bouncing around in the back of my truck all day uh and then unloading it with forklift probably further agitated things but not that bad i so while that oil was draining i went and had a little bit better look around myself with this thing just see how everything's working you know and i noticed these injector lines are all loose i did not do that so what's the story there you know i don't i don't know why those would be loose especially on a machine with 114 hours now it's possible somebody was just cracking them loose to try and bleed the lines out you know maybe they had a vapor lock on the fuel system but other than that i don't know any reason that they would be off and when you do that too there's no reason to remove the locks for the lines uh the lines all have like a this little deal here and that holds the lines in a nice tight pattern i don't know why you would remove those things if you're just trying to bleed the fuel system but they have done just that unfortunately what that means as well is that now the fuel system is contaminated right at the injection pump hopefully we didn't get any water down into the injection pump itself that would be bad those injection pumps are really really really precise and any kind of corrosion in there would cause big problems when it comes time to prime the fuel system we'll let these bleed out pretty good up here make sure we don't have any water in there i did just check the radiator and it looks perfect that's nice and clear but green coolant all the way up to the top and that's a completely sealed system so i uh expected nothing else all right i'm about to throw a wrench on the crank snub here and see if i can't get this thing to turn at all hopefully it's not locked up yet it has been sitting longer than i would like something like this to sit after it's been underwater okay yep it's turning i can hear it gargling yep and it stopped so what just happened was i hydro locked it basically it had a little bit of space to move a little bit before uh compressing the water so i've been looking this engine over and i haven't done any research about it yet but it looks to me like this is a kubota made engine probably produced for onan it just looks an awful like an awful lot like a kubota design to me so now with our valve cover off you can see what we've got going on here so this is your exhaust valve rocker this is your intake valve rocker and it's the same for all three cylinders here to adjust these valves you back off this nut just a little bit and then you take a screwdriver in here and you turn that a little bit does a lot to adjust the clearance on the valve so what you want to do is you just worry about your exhaust valves when you're trying to clear a hydrolock so we'll crack all three of these nuts and take them in one half turn which should be enough to not let the exhaust valves close even on the compression stroke the other option that i'm considering here is you take three thin washers and then just wedge them underneath of the rocker arm and the valve stem and that should give you clearance now the trick is here if you put too much clearance the trick is here if you would shim this too much and spin the engine over you could potentially hit the piston with the valve which would be very bad so if you're doing something like this even if you're just adjusting the valve clearance to do it never use the starter only use a wrench on the crankshaft to turn this over because that way you would feel if you're going to hit rather than just using the starter and smashing the crap out of your valves so that being said i'd rather not mess with the adjustments i'm thinking let's go ahead and try my shim method here nobody's ever told me to shim it like this but i think we're going to go ahead and try it i don't think we have anything to lose i'll just push the valve down with a screwdriver here and slide the washer in there and now the exhaust valve is hung open we'll do that the same to all three here and then we'll spin it over by hand and hopefully push all the water out the other thing i'm thinking we should do is go ahead and just knock the exhaust manifold off that way we're not retaining water in the manifold and just pushing it back and forth between cylinders lovely oh yeah oh she's a squirter so all right i think we got most of the water out of there but i can definitely still still hear some gurgling around in there now since i've made several full revolutions with the engine i know that our exhaust valves even though they're shimmed out like this are not contacting the piston to get that last little bit of water out of there we need some better speed more than i can do with the wrench now we can try and turn it over with the starter since like i said it's not contacting the piston so i'd like to turn it over with the starter but we don't have any oil in it and i don't want to just put fresh oil in there because i'm sure there's still some lingering water in the crank case so i think i'm going to put about a gallon of diesel fuel into the crank case and then we'll spin it over with the diesel fuel in the crank case and see what that does for us bottoms up baby whoa we're leaking okay well we got the diesel fuel in the crank case and we got a battery here we're going to hook it up and perform the smoke test hopefully nothing is shorted out and causes any problems good way to check if there's like something shorted you'll know if you go to hook it up and yeah okay see it's not trying to draw any power if it's trying to draw power as soon as you connect the battery you'll get an arc there or at least a small spark which will tell you it's trying to do something in a car it's turning on the computer and everything you should get a little spark but not a big arc on something like this nothing should be on something like this nothing should be drawing power so we'll use our battery installation hammer give those terminals a little tappy tap everybody loves when i beat on battery terminals i can't wait to see the comments section now anyways i think we're good i'm going to go ahead and hit the starter button you guys can sit over here and watch water spray everywhere at least i think that's what's gonna happen i don't even know if the starter works but uh here goes nothing oh yeah ready beautiful [Music] hey good thing going on too there's still fuel in the fuel filter and the injection pump is now pushing fuel up through our injector lines here perfect okay i don't see any more water coming out i think we're pretty much good to go there we go i just removed the shim washers from our valves there we are back into compression mode and as you can see there's fuel all over the place here from the injection pump push and fuel which is great that means we pushed out any water that might have been down in there while we're on the subject this fuel has a red tint to it and i get a lot of comments every time somebody sees me pumping red diesel fuel in our state and every other state i've ever been in i'm not sure if it's a federal thing or not off-road fuel is dyed red and you do not pay any road taxes on that fuel green diesel fuel or clear diesel fuel is taxed and you pay a road tax on that fuel so therefore i buy off-road fuel for all this off-road equipment that way i'm not paying road taxes i don't need to this is really going to start a comment war ii the red fuel that is designated for off-road use is exactly the same as the on-road fuel i know a lot of people try to tell me oh it's got higher sulfur content i have talked to dozens and dozens of fuel truck drivers that go straight to the plants and get loaded and they themselves put the dye packs into the fuel after the trucks loaded with fuel so i don't know that i'm sure i always get an argument with people about that but i've talked to tons of fuel truck drivers that tell me the same thing so yeah if you want to see what a war in the comments looks like just scroll down but anyways we cranked this thing over a little bit and sloshed that diesel fuel in the crank case around so let's open this thing up again and see what that fuel looks like yep that's watery looking but that fuel was also clear diesel fuel looks pretty good all right all right i've just pulled off the rear cover on the generator head here because i'm concerned about this bearing i don't believe that there is a front bearing i think this is the only bearing i have to worry about in the generator and it is a sealed bearing but what i'm concerned about is that the water may have passed that seal and gotten stuck inside there now and will cause bearing failure prematurely so i'm going to go ahead and pop that seal face off of there and pack it full of grease again yep well i don't know i can't tell if there was water in there or not but uh could definitely use a little bit more grease so pack a little bit of grease in there don't want to get too much in there it'll actually cause problems with our seal can you guys hear the meatball outside the door playing with this big ball he sounds like an honest-to-god movie monster like if you want to know what it's like to live with a monster get an english bulldog [Music] because we cranked the engine over it uh filled the filter up with the diesel fuel at this time we should be ready to go ahead and put some oil in it uh it is dripped oh it's going to drip as far as fuel out of the crankcase i want to add a little bit of oil and let it push oil out too that way it will kind of use the oil as a squeegee you know as my thought process it kind of pushes out any last remaining moisture hopefully that isn't in the crankcase this ball has made it in [Applause] all right we don't need an oily ball or an oily pup i think you're about ready for a break eh all right we're right on the full mark that's great install our filter and then we can focus on the fuel system since the filter is installed upright we can pre-fill it i don't know what's going on here this filter it's like it's the wrong thread pitch like it starts to thread it's the right diameter i don't know do those threads look weird in the filter to you guys because i can't tell if it's just because they're covered in oil or what but they kind of look weird to me the threads on the filter housing are fine the old filter threaded right off no problem i don't understand what's going on here well let's have a gander at our fuel tank here it is pretty scudgy looking in there yeah good bit of dirt good bit of water droplets i see and some nasty fuel or fuel water dirt combination let's try and get that drained out and cleaned out so so [Applause] all right i'll bottle this up and send it up to peg from zip ties and buy supplies see if he can get old slave lake to run on this garbage go ahead and dump some fresh fuel in here and slosh it around try and flush this thing out the saving grace here is that the tank isn't rusty it's just dirty so hopefully we can float the dirt out and be all right oh yeah yeah that's the stuff right there um i think we're going to do that one more time better still pretty gross looking look at that fuel tank is all nice and clean now looking good so it's the next day come back from the parts store i got a new air filter new fuel filter and resolved our oil filter debacle now this is a 1344 this is not the filter i pulled off of there it's not the same number the filter that was on this unit was a standard filter and this is a kubota engine so it had a metric thread pitch the trick was that other filter came right off like butter and would go on right like butter the threads looked fine it didn't look like somebody had just cranked it on there and made it work everything looked correct so i just ordered the filter that was already on this thing didn't think anything of it but they must have done what i was unwilling to do and that is just get it started and then run it home and so after a little bit of digging around me and the parts guy come up with a metric oil filter that should spin right on here hey look at that huh well i love it when a plan comes together and of course it stops right where you can't see the the number on it that's all right i'll wrap it i'll write the filter number on there when i write the hours and the date [Music] oh there we go there we go not too bad nice fancy pants new filter go ahead and pre-fill this thing because we don't have an electric fuel pump on here we'd have to sit here and prime it with this little doodad so save my finger a workout pre-fill this thing [Music] i always over fill them never fails so we are so close to being able to try to start this thing one thing i just thought of is this isn't like a normal generator this was wired into a panel so there's no i like outlets already on this thing so a we have no way to test it to know if it's outputting if it does run and b if this thing was cut out of a building like somebody just hacked the wires off need to be able to make sure yeah see there's a bunch of bare wires up in here just thrown into the box that's what i was afraid of i don't know what any of this stuff does that looks scary i do not know what that stuff is being that this thing was in a flood too of course all the instrumentation down in here all the relays and switches and if there was any wiring diagrams they're all covered in silt which isn't ideal for anything but it's like pick your battles because how do you clean that off of there well you're gonna have to like pressure wash it and there's like a circuit board and stuff down here yeah i'd rather not pressure wash that uh i don't know anyways i can keep an eye on everything as it is and i know that it's not going to touch or arc out or anything so i guess we're going to go ahead and try to prime the fuel system i already put about four or five gallons of diesel fuel in the tank we'll try and prime it and hopefully it pops off for us so to bleed this fuel system there's a bleeder here on top of the filter housing i've got to crack that loose [Music] open that up a little bit now the return spring on our lift mechanical lift pump here is a little weak but the other thing we could do too is just crank the engine over with the starter and that also runs the mechanical lift pump and that'll draw the fuel up from the tank and hopefully prime everything up the other good thing about doing it that way is that we're also turning the oil pump and that should build us some oil pressure and push all the oil through all the passages in the engine before we actually start it up so i think we might do that because this thing is irritating me so diesel fuel system is uh fairly simple but a little more complicated than a gas fuel system you got this line here goes to the bottom of the tank this is your pickup line this comes up here to your mechanical fuel pump in this case it's mechanical could be electric in and out the pump down here through the filter housing up over here into the injection pump and then the injection pump does its little thing and then shoots it out these three hard lines up to the injectors now not all the fuel is consumed by the injectors so there is this little bridge line between the injectors and that goes out here to a return line which goes to the tank so a fuel system on a diesel makes a circuit anyways let's go ahead and crank this thing over see if we can't get some fuel squirting everywhere [Music] yeah i actually just got sprayed with a little bit of water coming out of the vent holes on the generator that ain't good means there's still some water hiding in there somewhere there we go so we'll shut that bleeder valve off we got fuel to the filter now so it's through the pump down through the filter now we'll crack this nut here loose and that'll bleed it all the way up to the injector pump and then the next place we'll have to bleed it is up here on the actual injectors contact all right got fuel up to there and oh i forgot these three nuts here need tighten down yet we already got fuel coming up out of this one we'll get those tightened up and then we'll bleed them up here all right we just need fuel on these three injectors and we should be good to go got this one bled a little bit coming out of this one we're gonna give it a little bit more crank yet looks like we pushed a little bit of water out of these lines too i probably should have just blown them out with the air compressor when i had them off of there but this will work too we'll just let it crank a little bit longer and push all the nastiness out contact oh yeah yeah that's a nasty fuel that's pushing out of there go go give that starter a break a second tighten all these down i think we're going to be just about ready to go all right we're ready for the big moment here this is the first attempt at starting since this thing was completely underwater i'm going to go ahead and give a little bit of glow plug here because these engines love their glow plugs and hopefully this fuel that this nasty looking fuel that was coming up out of the injector lines hopefully all the bad stuff's out of it only one way to find out ready contact oh it was really close you guys hear it contact [Music] oh we're so close one more time ready third time's a charm contact [Music] it's really close i think it's only running on one cylinder right now probably just need to push a little bit of air or maybe even water through the injector before it'll fire on all three contact there we go oh so close so close this is a nice smoky one for you guys you liking this i'm loving this contact hmm this generator is just slinging water let's find a nice fine mist all over me oh i still think we just keep cranking here i think it's just purging water and crud out of the fuel lines probably contact [Music] so so [Music] well as you can see it is running but as you may hear not quite right there's some sort of knocking just a slight knock in the generator side and i think it's got an injector maybe just missing a little bit and you hear it kind of hiccuping i already threw a good swing of lucas injector cleaner in there we'll let it run for a little bit sometimes these things sort themselves out uh the generator side i don't know i've never had a generator apart but we might might be doing that in the future probably been running about five minutes now and it does seem like the smoke has cleared up a little bit so i'm gonna let it run for maybe an hour or so and we'll just uh see what happens [Music] well it's been running over a half an hour now and the mist has not gone away in fact it may have gotten a little worse here it's coming you can hear that cylinder kicking in and out i narrowed it down as this cylinder right here i used the temp cones to tell me that so look we got [Music] so these two are running about the same you come down here to this one this one's only 219 214 204 it's considerably less and i had it sitting here so that forward most cylinder we'll call that cylinder number three see it just came in again i don't know why i think it's not getting enough pressure to fire the injector maybe there's something wrong inside of the pump the injection pump but i sat there with the temp gun held on that header for a while and i watched the temp it was actually around my 206 for a while it was running it was running just like this and then i had the gun on there when it came back in and you can instantly watch that exhaust manifold temp jump back up so i know it's that forward most cylinder and watch what happens when we crack the injector line loose on that cylinder as well so all right so that's the first time i've actually shut this thing down since it started and i brought it out here um what i just did there cracking the lines loose what that tells us if you were paying attention to the sound when i cracked this one open it didn't really make that much of an effect on how it was running and also when i crack it loose you could see it was had a ton of air bubbles coming out of this thing for some reason i'm not sure what that means as far as in our pump goes but there could be an issue there in this side of the injection pump now when we cracked open the middle one you could definitely hear the engine slowed down and ran worse and when we cracked it as well it was blowing fuel up out of this thing no and there was no air bubbles to be seen this one here was not spraying fuel it was mainly just bubbling and i've done this one here off camera it's the same thing sprays fuel everywhere no air bubbles definitely decreases the performance of the engine so it has to be this cylinder cylinder number three there and i'm thinking it's something to do with the pump i don't think it's actually our injector here now you could confirm that it's not an injector by pulling this injector and putting it up here and swapping those two and see if the problem follows but i'm like 99 sure that's not the issue it's got to be in our pump here somewhere i've had these pumps apart before it's not a fun job it's really really meticulous there's a lot of little small parts and it's super precise in there it has to be contamination free 100 so i'm not sure if that's something i want to tear into if it's worth it yeah i've seen some of these generators online people are trying to get like five grand out of them and then i've seen some for like 500 bucks so hard to say well guys i guess that's about all we have time for in this video now here's the fun part about youtube i'm kind of relying on you guys to give me some ideas of where to where to look next for the issue on this thing i i think it has to be in the injection pump i don't know any reason it would push air bubbles up to the injector line if you guys know definitely drop a comment down below put me on the right path here because i'm kind of at a loss my next step is just muddling on my own probably just pull that injection pump up out of there and disassemble it and see if i see some sort of scarring in the bores or something on the pump so if we work on this thing again in the future it's going to be quite a while i really just jumped on it people say i bounce around on projects a lot which i do admittedly but this project here was just something that i had to tackle because it was full of water as you guys could see i couldn't just let it sit around until i finished something else up i had to get it done now otherwise the engine would be junk so is what it is at least we did get it fired up we did get it to run so that's proof of concept and actually the the thumping i said that i heard in the generator head was actually just this cylinder misfiring so that uh became clear to me after it ran for a little bit other than that the unit seems to function properly the hour meter works we look we put we put over an hour on it now uh i had to shut that off the switches all function just like they should the glow plugs all work everything's good to go there i don't know i think we might have a slight leak in the radiator somewhere the front of the radiator looks just a little bit damp right now and when i crack the cap there's no radiator pressure so well it sounded like there was a little bit of pressure just now but anyways everything's running good it uh the radiator was staying proper temperature nothing was getting out of hand there if you guys know anything else about these generators good bad ugly drop it down in the comments let me know what's going on there if you like the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up really helps the channel out doesn't cost you a thing if you're looking for any diesel creek merch don't forget we got a the store over there at dieselcreek.com link's down in the description and uh what else i guess that's it i'll catch you guys in the next video thanks for watching later [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 901,261

Keywords: Diesel, Genset, generator, onan, 4.0, kw, kilowatt, 4.0dkc, kubota, d905, Flood, hydrolocked, salvage, free, junk, equipment, heavy, construction, repair, forklift, allis, chalmers

Id: i59FS8yhWq0

Length: 49min 40sec (2980 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021