February 11, 2019 – February 14, 2019
What I left out of our last post was how, on the way to El Calafate, we had stopped at a mirador, and when we got back into the truck and tried to start it, it would not start. Dutch tourists that we had been chatting with, and who were also about to pull out of the mirador, knocked on our window to see if we needed help. “No, I think we are okay,” said Derek, and so they pulled out. We sat. We cursed and we both pondered a bit. Finally, Derek “bumped” the ignition to cycle the new lift pump a few times, and then was able to start the engine. We continued on our way to El Calafate, neither of us stating the obvious….the truck was clearly STILL not fixed.
Leaving Calafate we once more made our way to the border of Argentina and Chile. Our destination was the town of Puerto Natales, and from there we were hoping to visit Torres Del Paine National Park.
We got to the border and, as we both needed to go into customs and immigration, we turned off and locked the truck. When we came out again, the truck did not want to start. Eventually, we got it going, drove the 15 kilometres to the Chile border buildings, and shut it off again. Clearly, the new lift pump we had had installed in Coyhaique had not fixed the starting issue.
We made it to Puerto Natales and camped for the night, then made the decision that we needed to head into the larger town of Punta Arenas and visit another mechanic. We researched garages and found that there was a Bosch injection shop in the city. The truck started up pretty good the next morning, but we couldn’t risk heading into Torres del Paine, another park where we would have to hide the dog, and then not be able to start the truck.
Long story short, the Bosch service shop could not get any dash trouble codes but concluded we should have our 6 injectors removed and bench tested. As it turns out, 3 out of the 6 injectors failed the test. Why this had not shown up on the diagnostics that we had had done THREE times previously, or why there were no dash codes indicating faulty injectors, we will never know, but apparently it’s not unheard of. In the test laboratory, Derek was shown the bench test pressure and leak test results and also shown highly magnified photos of the injector nozzles where the tiny ball seals were leaking. Remarkably good fortune to find this high tech service shop here near the end of the continent.
The bad news was that it was going to cost a lot of money for new Bosch injectors. The good news was that they could be flown in from Santiago, would be there the next day and we could stay in our camper outside of the garage, use their facilities and wifi, and the labour would be very cheap.
After the work was done, Derek and the mechanic took the truck for a test drive, and all was good. It started up immediately, like new! something it had not done this well since we entered Chile more than 100 days ago.
Now we had to decide, should we return to Puerto Natales and attempt to visit Torres del Paine (google images of it if you are not familiar with it, it is beautiful), with Piper hidden in the camper, or should we continue on to Tierra del Fuego. We looked at the weather forecast, and the cloudy, rainy conditions in Torres del Paine convinced us to continue south to Tierra del Fuego, and ultimately to the town of Ushuaia, the town we had been driving towards since day 1 of the trip.