The Mystery of Digby’s repeating Glow Plugs…!

About a month ago, as I ploughed my way through the many and various Delica forums from around the world, I watched a video from someone who was having problems with cold starting their Delica, and I noticed that the way the glow plug indicator and the relay worked on a very similar vehicle to ours, was quite different. So much so, I made a video of my own and posted it to the worldwide Delica Owners Club page of Facebook and asked for comment.

I received a bunch of replays from around the world that basically said that what was happening was not what they normally experienced, (EG “Glow plug timer/relay buggered. Glow plug should glow for about 3 - 5 seconds and then switch off after starting when the engine reaches desired temp”, or “ Hmm, never seen or heard a relay switch on/off like that at a regular interval or even one that does that.”

As I had Harry the Mechanic coming around to do some other work, I asked him about the way the glow plugs were working, and he agreed that it did not seem normal in his experience too… He was also breaking a Series 1 Delica and had a spare glow plug relay & ECU on hand and would come round and take a look at Digby and replace the current units if he found anything suspicious.

Well, what do you know….? Upon further examination, Harry the Mechanic found an aftermarket glow plug timer, fitted by a previous owner, with an 'Afterglow' function that kept pulsing the relay & plugs for about 10 seconds after the initial coil light goes out. He wasted no time in removing the aftermarket unit, replace the ECU and Relay and now everything working as it should do….. Cheers Harry….

It just goes to show, you never know what someone else has done to your beloved Delica until something goes wrong…..

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Captain’s Chair Mod

I have spent about 9 months looking through various Delica forums and websites to find some information and guidance on how to move one of my middle-row Captain’s Chairs forward to the front passenger side location in Digby. This is a pretty popular mod for your Delica if you can have a Captain’s Chair or can buy one cheap, and I have found a good resource for this mod, ( here ), that show how the mod can be done with a degree of involvement and complexity. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much research you do in advance, something you didn’t expect comes along to throw you off…… When I removed the front passenger seat and lifted the carpet it became apparent pretty quickly that my simple idea of just lining up the rails and drilling some holes was not going to be as simple as I had hoped. Firstly, the bolt holes for the rear mounting on the front passenger seat were significantly wider than either the seat holes at the front of the passenger’s seat or the width of the Captain’s Chair

New Glow Plugs

Like many Delica owners, morning start-ups on cold days could be a nervous experience that came with a number of attempts and huge clouds of grey smoke, so it was time to investigate. After reading the forums the general advice was to take a look at the glow plus as a first step, and if that didn’t work, there might be a more serious issue. So I got hold of some Bosch 5.0mm glow plus (Bosch part: F005X12917) which took no more than 10 minutes to install, including giving the Bus Bar a good clean, and the Delica fired up immediately and with much less smoke. I can report that the glow plugs have been in Digby for a while and it still starts up first time every time. I strongly recommend that any Delica owner that is struggling with cold starts change the glow plugs immediately…. Note: I have had the new Glow Plugs installed for over a year now and the Delica is still starting strongly on the first attempt, and almost no smoke at all.

“Second Fix” and finishing the Interior

It’s been a while since my last blog post so I thought I would update you on where we are up to in terms of the fit-out of our beloved Delica; Digby I’m calling this phase the “Second Fix” not because it’s the next step in the build process, but a lot of what I have been doing recently is redoing stuff a second time…! After building the rear wardrobe unit I realised that I had positioned the bottom openings far too low to allow for the 15cm mattress we were planning on, and that the openings were a bit larger than we needed so I re-designed and re-built the front of the wardrobe to fit the new plan I had also built the carcass of the right-hand side unit as part of the “First-Fix” but again realised that it was both too long and would be difficult to access, so I completely re-designed the unit with an integrated wine rack, (yeah, I did that..!), some open storage space, and closed-in storage on top with a lockable side opening for access. Whilst this was a much better use of space, or

Digby's Aimless Adventure

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