2006 T1N Sprinter – Black Death

The above picture is *NOT* my sprinter.  Its great example of how bad black death can get if you cont catch it early.

If you notice your van ticking (more that usual) and an oil smell in the cabin.  You probably have black death.  Open the hood, pop of the head cover, if it is a black mess, you have it.  If not sure, run the engine and you will see smoke puff out from one of the injectors.

A couple of weeks ago my Sprinter Van was decidely uphappy with my lack of maintenance and decided to start stinkin up the interior.  It smelled like burnt oil.   I topped up the oil, but the smell did not go away, so I thought I was in for some kind of a gasket replacement.  Oops, not today.

Opened up the engine, while running, and there was a Pffft, Pffft sound coming from under the top cover.  Little whisps of black smoke, puffing out.  I took off the back cover and black death on cyl #3 showed itself…

Here is how to fix it:

• Clean of the black death – de-carbonizer or oven cleaner.
• Engine must be HOT
• One at a time:
  • Remove an injector
  • Cut a new seat
  • Rethread the hole
  • New copper washer

Parts Needed

• OEM Fuel Injector Washers (copper washers)
• OEM 6mm injector clamp bolts
• White ceramic antiseize grease (Loctite LB 8036) – I could not find any of this stuff so I used Permatex Nickel anti seize grease

Special Tools

• Injector puller (maybe… see below)
• Injector seat reamer (DIY if you have a lathe – see below)
• M6x1 long bottom tap (or DIY from a long M6x1 bolt – see below)
• Lots of Carb Cleaner
• Lots of paper towels

 

Clean It Up

• Remove the injector cover
• Get the engine warm.  Warmer the better.
• Using carb cleaner spray all the black crap
• Wait for the carb cleaner to work it magic, it black splooge will get somewhat soft
• Carefully use a screwdriver and work off the splooge, vacuum cleaner helps
• Get a whole bunch of paper towels, shove them down around the injectors and soak out the black crap
• Repeat and repeat…

Looks pretty good now eh?

Loosen It Up

• Re-install the injector connectors and return line (with clips)
• Warm up the engine, get it nice and warm
• Shut the engine off
• While the engine is warm loosen the injector retaining bolt
• Spray carb cleaner in the injector well, around the faulty injector
• Let it sit overnight
• Clean up any remaining carb cleaner

Injector Removal

• Clean up any remainig carb cleaner, by stuffing rags into the injector well
• Run the engine, get it hot
• If you are lucky (like me), the injector will come loose right away.  You will notice when running, it will put out a lot more smoke.
• If that does not work, go for a drive,  and gas it up a hill – the injector should pop.
• If that does not work get an injector puller from eBay (about $60)
• Shut off engine, disconnect the battery
• Remove the fuel line, return line and the electrical connectors
• Take a 29mm wrench, or a pair of channel pliers and *gently* rotate the injector a little bit. A LITTLE BIT AND BE GENTLE.
• Once it starts to work loose, you can wiggle it and GENTLY pull up on it. The injector will pop out!

Cleanup

• Spray paper towels with carb cleaner and wipe up as much as you can around the holes
• Use paper towel wrapped around a dowel with carb cleaner to clean inside the hole
• Clean up the injector with carb cleaner

Ream the Seat

Rather than purchase a seat reamer, I turned a piece of steel rod down to 15mm.  Then using very strong double-sided tape I put on a nice little piece of 150grit emery paper.  Worked real nice.

Clean the Clamp Screw

Cut a slot in the old M6 injector bolt and screw it in-and-out many, many times in the threaded hole to clean it up.

Install Injector

• lube the injector body (not the tip) with anti-seize compound.
• put a little bit of anti seize compound on the copper washer to hold it in place
• place the hold down clamp on the injector and slide the injector into its hole.
• tighten the hold down clamp to 7 N·m (62 lbs. in.) then 90°
• replace the fuel return line, electrical connectors, battery negative lead
• start the motor (might take a bit), let it run and look for leaks.  Hopefully it purrs like a kitten.
• put the cover back on
• enjoy.

 

 

Reference

Sprinter manual 14-38

Clean out bolt: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showpost.php?p=171041&postcount=45

DIY Seat cleaning tool: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showpost.php?p=171043&postcount=46

DIY tools: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showpost.php?p=171044&postcount=47

Bleed the fuel system: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showpost.php?p=172658&postcount=61

Injector seal DIY tips: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?t=26341

Injector hold down bolt torque: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25300&highlight=injector+bolts+test

Aqua Puttana tools: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showpost.php?p=137431&postcount=3

 

Diesel Injector Puller: http://www.lasertools.co.uk/items/pdf/Products/4762_Instructions.pdf

Remove injector without a tool: http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30294

http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16068&highlight=black+death

http://sprinter-source.com/forum/showthread.php?p=201523#post201523

 

 

CNC Controller Cart

Because I dont have the extra $1000 to spare, and I am a one man shop, I figured I would use my CNC controller computer and drives for both the RF45 CNC Mill and my CNC Router.

So I made up this handy dany cart for the computer and control box.  I can just roll it from one machine to the other, plug in the machine and start Mach with a different profile.

 

Now I could have made this from 8020, or mild steel, but I chose 1″ square tube aluminum because it looks better and is a bit cheaper. I could have had my good buddy Dave at Moto Trials West who is an excellent specialty welder, but I chose to create some angle plates and use rivets.  Why?  If you can believe it, I have never really done a project out of rivets and it looks kinda cool, kinda retro airplane look.  Aw what the heck.

Anyways, it all worked out well.

RF45 CNC – Coming Along…

X, Y, Z steppers and pulleys mounted. Spindle bearings upgraded and installed.  Head installed.  Starting to look like a mill again.

 

Lathe Tailstock DRO

Using a spare old chinese caliper, I cut all the nasty bits off, made a collar for the tailstock quill and mounted it.  Works like a charm.

 

Quick Method for Lathe Centering in a 4 Jaw Chuck

Here is a video of a quick method for centering in a 4 jaw chuck By David Lemeries.

 

For this to work well you will need a dial indicator mounted horizontally and a small chuck key you can use on the inside of your lathe.

Here is the DTI holder I made for my quick change toolpost.

 

And here is a small chuck key I made from a 1/2″ and a 1/4″ bolt.

 

 

 

Design Your Own Mach3 Screens

Turns out that making your own Mach3 screens is pretty straightforward.

For me I wanted a very simple screen, with big buttons for use with a touch screen.

Screensets consist of a series of PNG bitmap images for your buttons. these are stored in your personal folder under the “bitmap” folder of Mach3.  There is also a “screenset” file (with a “.set” extension) that represents the screen design.  This is stored in the root of the Mach3 folder.

 

The Process

1. Make a series of bitmap PNG files for each button you will have
2. Use Screen4 or MachScreen  program to design the screen
3. Load your screenset into Mach and use it!

Controls

When designing a Mach3 screenset there are a variety of types of controls. Here are the more popular ones:

• Button – ugly screen buttons.  Good for quick and dirty.
• Image Button – use your own PNG image as a button.  Hip and sexy.
• Label – display text or special messages on the screen (like error messages)
• DRO – display output from Mach3 (X, Y, Z coordinates, feed rate, etc etc)
• LED – turn an area red or green depending on a state in Mach3

 

Making Your Own Image Buttons

There are a few ways you can make nice image buttons:

1. use existing images in the /bitmaps folder of Mach3
2. download other screensets and use their image buttons
3. make your own using a simple graphics editor like MS Paint

I chose to make my own buttons.  I used google images to find a nice 3D button, then used it in MS paint and drew on my text.  I repeated this for all my image buttons.

Make sure to:

1. save your images as PNG
2. make the background colour of the button the same as the intended back ground colour of your Mach3 screen.

Which Screen Designer?

There is Screen4 and MachScreen.  Screen4 is written by Art, same guy who wrote Mach3.  MachScreen is written by Klaus. Both are free.  I find Screen4 awkward to use, and full of a lot of little rules, however, for more complex screen setups, people say this is the one to use.  Klaus’ MachScreen is much more like a regular windows app and works good enough for my needs.

 

Screen Resolution

You should design your screen using the target resolution of your CNC Controller monitor for best looking results.  NOTE:  the Mach3 Menu line and the Windows Task bar take up valuable room on your screen.  You can autohide the windows task bar, but you will still have the Mach3 title bar and menu.  This will push your screen design down. Make sure you account for this.

Do I have to make screens for all the functions of Mach3?

Not me.  I chose to make just the one screen I want.  If I want to access other features, I am just going to jump back to the stock Mach screenset called 1024.  If I seem to be using a specific feature a lot, I will just add it to my own screen.

Using your Custom Screenset

To load a screenset, in Mach3, click “View->Load Screens”.  Go to your screen set file and viola!  Your screen is displayed.

If your screen resolution is different than the resolution you used to design your Mach screens, you can stretch it to fit by selecting “Config->General Config->Screen Control->Auto Screen Enlarge”.  The reload the screen set.

 

Spindle Grease

My angular contact bearings cost me well over $500.  Since it wont be easy to lubricate them, I will be using some kind of grease.

Well, like every oil thread out there, lots of opinions abound.  Here is the most popular:

• Kluber Isoflex NBU-15
• DOW Molykote G-2001
• DOW BG-20 and BG-555 Synthetic
• Mobil SHC 32

Here are the Mobil and DOW product manuals.

https://www.dowcorning.com/content/publishedlit/80-3256.pdf
http://www.mobilindustrial.com/ind/english/files/sc_grease.pdf

The winner?  Kluber.  Why?  Most everyone either loves it or will argue against it because it is too expensive. But really, I am only lubricating two bearings, perhaps once every year or two.

Timing Belt Pulley/Belt Calculations

For the RF45 CNC conversion a lot goes into determining the timing belt pulleys.  The two major factors I am considering are:

• precision of axis movement
• speed of rapids

Precision of Movement

For the mill, I am wanting 0.001″ precision (+/- 5/10ths). So first step (pun intended) is to make sure my steppers increment below this about by a factor of at least 3 or 4.   My ballscrew threads are 5TPI, and motors are 200 steps per inch.  5 revolutions (5*200 = 1000 steps) will give me 1 inch. That means 1 step will be 0.001″.  Not good enough.

I need stepper pulleys to be at least 3:1 or 4:1 ratio.

B&B Manufacturing has a great timing belt calculator

4:1 too difficult to achieve

Using the calculator, it became obvious really quick that a 4:1 ratio would require a large seperation of pulleys to maintain a minimum of 6 teeth on the smaller pulley.  So it will have to be 3:1.

Sizing Pulleys and Selecting Belts

Since I will be ordering pulleys and belts from  McMaster.  I would use the calculator to select pulleys that were available at McMaster.  Then enter a starting center distance find a belt that would be available.  Eventually arriving at a desired pulleys and belt.

Speed of Rapids

My CNC controller computer uses parallel ports, which can output pulses reliably at 100kHz. My motors are 200 steps/rev.  Ballscrews are 5TPI. Pulley ratio is 3:1.

• 100kHz  Pulses is 6,000k pulses/min.
• To move the axis 1″ will take 5 revolutions of the ballscrew
• To rotate the ballscrew 1 rev takes 3 *200 steps

So, it takes 3*200*5 = 3000 pulses to move the axis 1 inch. 6,000k / 3k = 2000 IPM.  Ahh, errr  rapids are not a problem.

 

Sears Kenmore Elite Dryer Wont Run

Kenmore Elite HE3 Limited Edition, perhaps 10 years old.  Whirlpool OEM.   Model number 110.C83902202

Symptoms

Close door, press Jeans (or any other mode), control panel lights, press start, a relay clicks and nothing happens.

Diagnosis

1.  Power to dryer – AOK as front control panel lightcomputer
2. Door switch – AOK. Try starting dryer with door open, control panel will beep three times.  With door closed, control panel does not beep.
3. Start Switch – AOK.  When I press and hold the start switch a relay clicks.
4. Thermal Fuse – hmm, I will have to tear down the machine to test this.
5. Broken belt or belt switch.  – Had this happen before. I will have to tear is down to find out.
6. Shorted/Burnt wiring – often near the terminal block (poor connection) – will have to check
7. Bad Motor – often accompanied by a loud buzzing sound (start cap,) mine does not make this noise, but will have to check.
8. Timer failure – will have to check
9. Computer board

 

 

 

Took off the top panel and dug out the instructions.  Went through the diagnostics.  When pressing START in diagnostic mode, the dryer would not start and a 06 would flash.  Could not find what this code meant.

Removed the kick panel, tested the thermal fuse. BINGO – open circuit.

 

 

Oiling the X Axis Ball Nut on the RF45

 

The Y and X axis ballnuts are easily reachable by a hand pump to keep them nice and lubricated.  I might even upgrade these to a one shot system, sometime in the future, but for now a had pump is simple and easy.

But the X axis nut is buried under the table in a very cramped location.  I tried to put in a hard line, then a softline but both interfered with the table (the above image show the first attemp).  What I needed was a very small elbow with a 1/8″ compression fitting at one end and a 6mm thread on the other.  No way McMaster had one of these, so I made one up myself.

I took a piece of 10mm steel rod.  Turned down an end to 6mm.  Drilled in a 2mm hole for the oil.  Threaded the end.  At 90 degrees, drilled a 1/8″ hole for the hard line, then lopped off the end.  Had to do a bit of filing to keep the clearance low.