Bad things happen to good people – Part 2.

Well, we didn’t get far before things went sideways, just 260 miles. It took about five hours to get from Bend Oregon to the Loves Truckstop in Ontario Oregon. We left as it was getting dark, we came through the Western Oregon mountains without incident and if you know route 20 these hills are no joke! The Wanderlodge has a Telma / Jacobs drive line retarder, an electro-magnet aligned with the drive shaft, it is absolutely incredible compared to the exhaust jake brakes I have used in the past. I never had to hit the brakes once, the retarder kept our speed completely under control.

We had filled up with fuel before we left Bend OR, so we were carrying about 265 gallons of Diesel. We hadn’t even made a dent in the fuel gauge when we started to lose power, the engine felt like it was starved of fuel. We had just passed the Loves entrance and pulled over on the side of the highway onramp. We let it idle for a minute when it finally quit. Fortunately we both had experience with heavy equipment, so we went through the typical checklist. I opened up the airbox and hit it with a couple shots of starter fluid, it kicked over and died out, so we knew we had to focus on if we had prime / fuel. We went back to the Racor, pulled the filter and in the last five hours it became covered with sludge, it was blocked. We didn’t have a spare so we shook it out, rinsed it with some of the ATF we had on hand, trying to get it clean enough to turn back into the Loves lot so we didn’t have to deal with being told to get a tow off the shoulder. We put the filter back, filled up the Racor with ATF and tried to get moving. No go. We hit it with a few shots of starting fluid but it wouldn’t catch, so we started with the Caterpillar 3208 hand pump. If you have never used it before be prepared to pump like a thousand times, we took turns, finally we got prime and it started!

Back to the Loves we went to spend the night. We will work on plan B in the morning.