Always the case.....

After a WONDERFUL week away in the country, the Good Lady Wife and I return home, to the not unexpected news that the venerable 360 refuses to start.......
Right, I thinks, damp plus overfuelling - since we've had a lot of rain the last week, and these things tend to flood very easily...

Off comes the dizzy cap, quick squirt of WD40 and wipe cleap with rag, off come the leads, quick clean with rag, No.3 lead very loose strangely enough.
Attempt to start again - fires but huge misfire, and obviously still flooded. Right, thinks me. Will try again in the morning, but it looks like its a trip to work in the Missus' car, and a visit to the local parts place for a new set of leads afterwards - and hopefully no rain so's I can get it sorted!

Such is life........

Tom.

You get rain in upside-down land?

How is that possible?

Yah, we get rain here. People hose their gardens in Europe,it filters down through the centre of the earth, comes up to the surface here, then via a tremendously complicated process possibly involving clouds and steam and suchlike proceeds to tip huge barrel loads of the horrible damp stuff into my cars already fragile electrics.....



We do get roughly the same amount of raid as London, but we tend to get a few weeks of really heavy rain, then not much for the rest of the year, whereas London gets it all spread out over the year (unless you're from my hometown - Walsall, then it rains all the frickin time!


Not a huge problem to fix, just rather inconvenient!

Your car is injection model, there is that extra fuel injector at manifold, try unhooking that when starting, maybe that way you could get it dry. I'm not sure if it has no fuel on start up if WOT capability like some injection cars do have for clearing flooding.

NGK spark plugs die easily if flooded, with BOSCH 4 tip plugs I have had no such issue quite damn hard to cause even flooding with those, if there is even bit of air fuel will burn, great plugs, imo.However some say that BOSCH is crap, dunno

I have no idea why mine has never had any more trouble at wet than it has when it is dry and now with new carb I think there would be even less trouble as those troubles that I had on dry weather should be away (if damn car just would stop leaking oil...).

Could be that fuel injected engines at warm and damp weather are more prone to problems, I would try without that extra injector at first, don't know if fuel injection goes to limp home mode or if it even has one when you unplug that injector's electric connector but at least that would be a good test. It does spray too much fuel with that injector anyway.

That cold start injector isn't even hooked on to the ECU. It's a separate circuit from the ECU's harness. The cold start injector is only connected to the time temperature switch in the head which just gives +12V to the cold start injector for specific time after startup when the temperature is below specific level.

Though LE-Jet doesn't even know if there are any injectors connected, wiring for all the four injectors comes from same two wires from the ECU and those two wires are just split for all four injectors in the wiring harness.

Thanks for the advice Guys, haven't been able to do much to the car today on account of A) Work and B) storms...
Bought a new set of leads and a distributor cap earlier on, that should fix the damp - though i'm really addressing the wrong problem there.... weather forecast looking ok for the next few days, so hopefully I can get to dry out the spark plugs ( yes, they are the Bosch ones.... )

I've heard these B200E lumps in the 360's suffer from overfuelling, and mine in particular! It fires up, runs on maybe three cylinders (up from yesterday when I think I had two running!) idles at around 400rpm them dies

Next plan of action is to get the plugs out, clean em up, and try it again.

As i've said, not a too serious issue, just annoying!

I would probably leave cold start injector disconnected or put some kind of restriction to it, it might work well when there is -20C but at summer it is not so great. Well I guess you have winter time down there? Almost like summer here, just not so wet?

Todays attempt......

Replace sparkplugs (only cos I found a spare set - figured it was worth a try)

Got a good strong spark right through to the plugs, fires, then the usual misfire and it chokes itself - so still flooding itself. Had a look at that injector, and can't see a way of blanking it off or anything like that.

Finally decided to throw my hand in. Will give Breakdown Assistance tomorrow morning and get someone out to it - I can't see them being able to do anymore than i've already done, but it will be nice to have a spare set of hands whilst I twist its metal nuts off...

Other alternative is to get it trailered to one of 2 volvo specialists in the area - it went to one of the garages late last year for exactly the same thing - all they did was to change the sparkplugs and tell me not to give it too much go pedal when I try to start it in future......which was helpful.

I'm going to end up looking like a total clown here, but I really think its the only option left! Grrrrr......

You don't need to block that injector, just disconnect it's electric connector, squeeze that metal wire and carefully pray that electric connector off from that injector and you should be fine.

When there is no electricity then injector will not open.

For example I had that injector not connected with my Megasquirt setup, I just left injector on place and not connecting it's electric connector.

Tried what you suggested Jtbo, and it worked! Car seems to be running ok now.......... until the next time. Will have to remember that little trick in future!

Since these cars were exported here ( and detuned for the 91RON kangaroo pee they call fuel ) it makes me wonder why Volvo/DAF didn't think about blocking off the cold-start injector, as speaking to the Volvo garage today, its a very common problem here - mind you seeing as how the number of 360's in Western Australia are in single figures by now, who'd care?

As an aside,weren't the 340's built in Malaysia? Would these have been shipped over as knocked-down kits?

Great news then!

I know that 340 were build in NL, but maybe they were build also in Malaysia, haven't just heard from that before.

Don't know what kind of 340 you had there, we had very narrow time gap where 340 had 2ltr B19 engine and those with B19E are quite rare here, such is of course one which I would be interested if I ever can find one

I thought actually that you got only 360 there?

Always interesting to hear differences of each market area, would be great if there would be some kind of table from differences about every country