Dear
Click and Clack,
I just
bought a used, year 2000 Daihatsu Hijet minibus from a Japanese import lot here
in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It measures 5 feet wide by 11 feet long
and is 6'3” tall and is a 5 speed with a 660cc, 3-cylinder motor and uses lots
of regular gas, which costs $3.50 a gallon here. In 5th gear at 60mph it runs
at a little over 4 grand but it is adorable.
It's been
“tuned up” a couple of times now by street mechanics who each owned one
wrench-the 10mm is ubiquitous- a pair of bent pliers, a screwdriver and a piece
of cardboard or burlap to lie on in the street lieu of a creeper. The timing was set by
ear. When I have asked whether that thing that they are tweaking is a fuel
injector or a carburetor they tell me it is “somewhere in between” and keep on
turning the four adjustment screws on and near it until it idles smoothly and
restarts easily. After one bout of adjustment one mechanic shrugged and
suggested that I should start it cold by not touching the gas pedal and when
starting hot that I would need to keep it matted until it started and this
system has worked fine except for on New Year's Eve when, thankfully--because
drinking while driving is not discouraged here-- it would not start at all. One of
the muchachos spent about 3 hours New Year's Day underneath it installing 3 new
spark plugs and now it starts again using the methods described above.
In the
city it runs great and is peppy when weaving in and out of traffic-which is
essential here to avoid being run over by gigantic guaguas (busses) making left
hand turns across your bow from the far right hand lane through busy
intersections but on the highway, after about an hour of driving at a steady
cruising speed, it sometimes shows the unnerving symptoms of running out of (or
maybe of being flooded by?) gas and jerks, I mean IT jerks, and it almost dies
but this symptom is not at all predictable. Occasionally I think I detect an
increased smell of gasoline in the air when this happens but, since the motor
is directly under the front seats, this may be expected from time to time due
to proximity. I have, so far, always gotten to where I was going. One of the
mechanics working out of a grease pit found the fuel filter under the chassis
and blew it out from both sides with a compressor and proudly announced that it
had been installed backwards and reinstalled it the right way, but this seems
to have made little or no difference. I have also poured an assortment of
carb-cleaners and dry gasses into the gas tank and just when I think that did
the trick I find myself lurching toward the breakdown lane again. I do not want
to spend much time standing around in the breakdown lane because when the
street thugs here steal your sneakers they don't wait for you to take them off,
they remove them at the ankles with a machete-- without damaging the sneakers.
My real
question is why am I getting only 22MPG? I am certain that I am converting from
kilometers accurately and I have confirmed that the gas stations here indeed
sell the stuff by the normal gallon and I have checked the odometer by using a
handheld GPS unit and it agrees. I was hoping for more like 50mpg. One
“mechanic” tells me that 22 is normal because my model of Daihatsu has a turbo,
and, indeed, the van does have the word Turbocooler written on the side in what
appears to be factory lettering but I do not know what an actual turbo looks
like or how much one might drink.
What do
you think?
P.S.-
Well, I
thought that the new plugs had cured the “dying on the highway” problem but
three days ago it died dead in a backwater village far from home. A mechanic who
materialized out of the bushes determined that I had a bad “pita de abajo”
which was failing to control the flow of gasoline. He described this pita as a
small vertical pin that works like a float and is next to the real float and is
located in the lower half of the carburetor. He then adjusted the carburetor
for highway driving, so that I could get to where I was going, which meant that
the thing ONLY ran at 3500 rpm or above and stalled instantly at idle but could
be restarted. This strategy worked (at the expense of much of the clutch while
negotiating speed bumps, traffic lights and craters and goats in the road) for
200 miles when it died dead again in a smaller village, even farther from home,
and so the next mechanic had to be fetched by a friendly stranger on a Honda
50cc Club Special motorbike and he determined that the fuel pump was working
erratically. So, after finally locating a new-used fuel pump we changed it on
the side of the road-and it is a submerged fuel pump so we had to drop the gas
tank and he figured that maybe a wire was bad too so, after stripping the ends
of a found length of insulated wire with his teeth he ran it from the tank to
the fuse box where he jammed it in alongside one of the live fuses. The motor
idled and ran at normal rpm for 5 miles, even though the screws on the
carburetor had not been reset, but then reverted to its custom-highway tuning
of before-- but I made it the 80 neck-jerking, backfiring miles back home, and
boy was I glad to get there.
So now
what do you think?
P.P.S.
I have
taken the Daihatsu minibus to a real Daihatsu dealership to be worked on. They tell me that
there has been a spate of bad gas in the country and that this could easily be
causing all of my problems. The bad gas evidently came from the National Refinery
which, fearing fuel shortages over the holidays, topped off their supplies of
gas with an, as yet undetermined, although clearly detrimental to the fuel
delivery system, substance- garages have been reporting ten-fold increases in
fuel pump and pita de abajo replacements in the past weeks.
P.P.P.S.
I just
retrieved my minibus from the Daihatsu dealer because they refused to work on
it because, evidently, none of the running system is Daihatsu-they did not know
what it was, but it was nothing they had seen before and did not appear in
their computer. So I bucked and burned the clutch back to Moto Plaza where I
had purchased it in the first place and I will find out more on Monday how this is going to be resolved.
Jan 30,
Monday--
Moto
Plaza, in a last ditch effort to get the guaguita running smoothly, removed all
of the vacuum tubing as well as disconnecting the air filter and the
turbo-cooler. But the guaguita ran worse.
 |
| Motor of the guaguita denuded of vacuum tubing. |
Moto Plaza
replaced the motor with all its adjunct
parts with a motor from a similar guaguita in their lot and the guaguita
ran worse.
Moto Plaza
has painted me up another minibus from their lot. This one is white, does not have a
turbo, has a simpler motor and is supposed to be ready for me this Friday.
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