Who remembers back in the old days we used to clean and gap spark plugs as a normal part of a service?
The new, to us, van we picked up earlier this month has a 3.2kw generator in the front tool box, on a slide. Problem with it was, it wouldn’t start (it has an electric start). Checked fuel, plenty of that and it is reasonably fresh. Pulled the spark plug, after much dicking around to get to it (so much plastic to make things more attractive for the market) and jumped it back to the only exposed bit of engine casing I could find. Hit the starter and sparks were flying, just not in between the electrodes of the plug. They were dancing around between the insulator nose and the body of the plug. I set about cleaning the gap, that was supposed to be between these parts, with a normal tailors pin and was amazed at the amount of carbon that could fit in such a small space. This used to be done on a machine at the local mechanical workshop from memory. I then gapped the electrode, replaced it and kicked it over.
Bugger me, fired up first go and ran. It was a tad Smokey for about 2 minutes of run time, but then cleared and finally settled into ‘quiet mode’. Tested it out by plugging into the vans inlet, and all things 240v came to life, better and better. I thought I would push my luck and see what happened when I turned the air conditioner on. Sh1t that works as well, mind there is no guarantee that the fridge or battery charger were drawing any current at the same time, but I am stoked.
I shut the genny down and started it a few times to make certain it wasn’t a fluke, and it just kicked into life and settled nicely. Another boxed ticked for our next trip.
Only thing I would like to get working now is the remote start function of the genny. That would be totally cool, sitting in the van during a storm with the rain bucketing down. Hit the remote and your generator starts up (then you go outside into the storm and bucketing rain to plug the genny into the van
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