An early start this morning, the cool weather from yesterday continued, and we woke up to a chilly 15°C in the trailer. Our well practiced packing up went well, and from falling out of bed, having breakfast and getting on the road took almost exactly one hour.
After the last few trips with broken pipes, tires etc I must admit to being a little apprehensive about this one. As it turns out, I had good reason for the apprehension; about 15 minutes into the trip the check engine light came on! I have a “black box” in the truck that gives me the 4 digit code that caused the light to come on, but there is no translation into English. I can however reset the light, so i did that and all was well. If the light stayed off I reasoned it couldn’t be too serious! About an hour later the light came on again, same code with no adverse effect, reset it and all was well for a few minutes! This time it came on again, and the truck went into “Limp mode” which limited its speed to 40MPH. Limp mode cleared itself,and I cleared the light. We were about 6 miles from a major town, so we continued to McDonald’s to get some free WiFi and a coffee. The coffee for the nerves, the WiFi to decode the code. Problem code equated to lack of fuel pressure at the injectors. First and easiest solution was to get some fuel additive with injector cleaner in it and chuck it in the tank, so I filled up with diesel, chucked in the additive and off we went.
All was good with the world. We started climbing, and climbing, and climbing. Out of respect to the engine I dropped the speed down to 35 MPH on some of the hills, at that speed the engine was still generating over 270 HP to keep us going, but keep us going it did. No more problems with lights or limp mode so whatever the problem was went away with either new fuel, the additive or both. We finally stopped climbing at 11,300 ft. Another 700 ft and oxygen would have been required if we were flying! At this altitude the temperature had dropped to 13°C, and there was some snow just off the side of the road.
Some General Views on the way through Colorado
Approaching the Summit at 11,300 feet.
Plus a couple of lunch time views
We then started the descent, with 12,000 lb of trailer behind you care has to be taken not to overheat the brakes, and not let the speed build up too much so that the brakes stand a chance of stopping you safely! Eventually we reached more level land at around the 7000 ft level. Probably the hardest day of driving I have had!
We made it to a nice modern RV park in Cañon City Colorado around 4:30. We got the trailer set up and I went to move the truck, it started… then cut out. The old problem was back, but like last time it was a quick fix. While fixing it I noticed some air bubbles coming from around the edge of the fuel filter housing. If you remember a couple of weeks back I put in a new fuel filter, the instructions explicitly said to only lightly hand tighten the filter. I guess my hand tightening wasn’t tight enough, I managed to get another half turn on it, enough to stop the air bubbles. Thinking back, if air could be sucked into the filter housing, that may explain the loss of fuel pressure earlier?
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