SOL-D trouble

[Bnave95]

Truck started cranked slow,got cold and would not fire. One bad battery.
New set,starts and runs great.
Thats all.
Just had to throw that out,3rd year;)

[Mark Rinker]

Sounds like they have a good product. I still carry spare FSDs around in the glovebox.

[Robyn]

Good deal
once I rewired my solenoid through a relay and took the load off the main wiring harness the SOL D pops the little rat right to,life enven when its cold.
I wait about 3 seconds after the glow light goes off and the volt meter comes back out of the gutter and then hit the starter and boom, running.

[Bnave95]

Some how I feel the SOL-D might have gotten a bad review. The 9 volt issue may have been a surprize even to them. Chris talked about how it held up in test in Australia summer. Could we have brought the cold start issue to his Att. Has it been address? I think Chris maybe a little backwards towards us. Not sure,may just be me.
Robin has the fix and I'm not sure why I have yet to have any cold start issue. Good wiring and grounds Mat. Staying on top of battery's.
It only took one morning knowing how truck cranks to know it wasn't right.
By now I should of replaced a FSD. Even a inj. pump when I thought it was going out. To many bad drivers(fsd) failing taking out a pump? Not sure.

[Robyn]

Every truck is going to be slightly different. The weather (climate) has much to do with how long wiring connections last.
A dry climate will help keep the corosion down some.
How many miles,the state of things when it was new. Was the trucks wiring harness assembled well when it was built? and so on.
The wire that feeds power to the PMD or in this case the SOL D is a very small lead and is on the end of a daisy chain the feeds several things once the ignition is turned on.
The starter solenoid also pulls of the main harness via the ignition switch. once the switch gets some miles and time on it the amperage and voltage delivered may very well suffer due to degradation of the switch contacts.
Once I releived the ignition switch of the heavy load of the solenoid, things really got better. Also the fuel lift pump runs off the same line as the starter solenoid feed.
The wiring could be improved a lot in these trucks for sure.
Too many scatered grounds that ground to sheet metal here and there around the truck to be called "GOOD"
All components including the lighting systems should have ground wires that all run to a common ground buss.
My class 8 western Star truck has ground wires for everything.
Ground faults can drive a techie crazy. How many times have we all seen a rig pulling a trailer and they turn on a signal and all the lights wink or alternately brighten and dim along with the signal that was selected. This is usually ground related.
With the high tech stuff we now have the connections must be absolutely perfect and the grounds the same or something is going to screw up.
If all the equipment had it + feed wire and its own ground feed wire ( to a common spot that is grounded back to the battery life would be a lot better.
trying to isolate some electrical issues can become almost impossible to the point of tearing the whole rig apart and replacing wiring harnesses.
A friend of mine bought a 99 Ford Stroke and got it cheap because it would not stay working, (engine mysteriously quit then work for days then quit)
he asked me what to do. I advised him to rewire the truck completely.
He ordered all new harnesses and rewired the thing over a couple weeks.
Sucker has not missed a beat since.
We never really looked at all the harnesses to see if we could find anything, he just tossed them in the trash.
Doing the under dash wiring harness was FUN ** NOT** I got roped into that mess. Just had to remove the whole dash and start from scratch and reassemble things.The engine bay also rated right up there on the LIST too.
The issue of wiring is one thing I have thought a lot about regarding my Hummer project, its getting a big truck full seperate ground system to eliminate so many issues. Since its a clean slate with no wiring I can do whatever I want.

Getting back to the SOL D I talked to Chris when I had the first cold start issue. He told me that the unit is designed to shut off at around 9V to protect the circuitry. They not only knew about it but it was a designed in item. He also told me that they were thinking about redesigning the Sol D with a voltage booster to eliminate the problem. He also stated that only vehicles with wiring issues ever had troubles.
The wiring system on our trucks is less than optimal, the feed wire coming to the PMD is very small and as I mentioned earlier its on the end of a daisy chain of items fed from the same circuit.
The problem is not the SOL D totally but a comedy of errors leading back to the original design. The PMD was designed to function with a far wider voltage variation than the SOL D. The original PMD was a POS and Stanadyne knew it as did GM. The issue was to get an electronic pump on the market and they pushed it ahead all well knowing that there were still issues that were unresolved. **LET THE FIELD REPS SOLVE IT***
One would expect to see a small amount of failures in any electronic device, but the vast numbers of losses with the PMD's was and is rediculous.
Simply put, the thing was a poor design shoved through engineering and produced without regard to the consequences.
Another black eye for GM.
The whole design should have been scrapped and something different done.
Too many delicate pieces with too many failure prone components.
Now I know I will catch it from someone here that has had good luck with their 6.5's and can make them work well. This is not the issue, the issue is that the original design sucked and it did so because folks in detroit were in a hurry to get it out the door. Bottom line is we should not have to rebuild a product that cost up $50K to get the thing to work satisfactorily. If we want to hot rod it thats different and we can pay the $$$ to customize it.
If the designers had taken a few of the new pumps and placed them in service and let bubba pound them a while they would have seen that the design was junk. It was all about meeting a deadline, always a bad choice.
My first electronic fueled 6.5 was an early 94, it ran 49 miles and two days after I bought it untill the first PMD issues surfaced with stalling and such.
My first 95 ran 3 months and 3 thousand miles (approx) untill it did the same thing.
All we are doing with the coolers and other items is putting a bandaid on a poor design.
If Chris with Remarq will address the voltage issue I think the pump a drivability issues with the 6.5 could be laid to rest for the most part.
The DS pumps are otherwise fairly good (NOW) they are usually capable of 100K+ on the mechanical portion as long as the fuel is kept clean.
Oh well debating what the big auto makers will do is like second guessing the weather.
Maybe this is one of the reasons them suckers are having a tough time making any money of late????????? ;0)
I rest my case !! (for a little bit anyway)

[damork]

Robyn - I agree with your approach entirely. 2 weeks ago I spent an afternoon cleaning up grounds which I had worked on previously to address a code 36 problem and again it helped, but this time something wasn't quite right. Using a good digital VOM, I found a ground strap that looked good to actually have a 4 ohm resistance to ground, one of the famous head bolts to firewall straps.

Along the lines of clean power, I think these trucks all should have a bank of relays cleanly packaged / wired to provide power for various systems rather than pulling from the ignition switch. My lift pump and transmission are relayed, but I still have the fuel sol, ECM1, ECM2, lights, & fuel bowl heater (Racor) to go. Just checking the fuel sol and ECM2 found I have a .4 volt drop just idling, haven't monitored it cranking or under load. I'll either build or buy something to hold the relays, so far I only find harness plugs.

[moondoggie]

Good Day!

As always, I agree with virtually everything said here by robyn, but I have an additional piece of data: GM was bleeding red ink > $1 billion per quarter in 1995. Does this excuse poor engineering and/or pushing something into the market early? Of course not. But it might help in understanding more fully the why of this lousy situation.

Blessings!

[Robyn]

And why were they bleeding out?
Could it be they were seeing a drop in sales?
Maybe getting a good product on the market would have slowed the bleeding? good bet it would not have hurt.
All the auto makers have turned out some real crap over the years all in the name of trying to get a leg up on their competition.
It never works, as soon as their goose lays a rotten egg they fall in the mud again.
Im a GM die hard and will probably continue to be one.
I used to be a Ford freak but after the 97 that STROKED me I went back to GM trucks.
Sure likeing my 91 BURB

[Robyn]

Also from what I understand GM and Stanadyne were having issues in regards to who owned what and whos technology would be mounted where.
There was I am told a real battle over the interface of the IP with the GM computer and the battle raged. GM would not yeild and niether would Stanadyne.
What we ended up with was a mess.
I am told GM wanted the ECM to control the IP but Stanadyne would have no part of it and would not share the technology even under contract so there you have it, at least as I have been told by folks in the industry.

[DmaxMaverick]

Newsflash.......

The ECM does control the IP. The PMD/FSD is only an amplifier (driver) of the signals sent from the ECM. The PMD is a package deal with the DS4 pump, and is necessary for pump operation (obviously). The same is for the LB7 and LLY Duramax. The EDU (the driver) controls the injectors, but the PCM controls the inputs, PWM, balancing, and fuel pressure parameters, essentially the same as the 6.5. The later LBZ, LMM and LLM all have full control in the PCM. Later electronic technologies make this possible, where before, the PCM was not capable of the task. Those injectors, and the pump in the DS4 case, need lots of amplified juice to fire, and the older PCM's could not supply it.

That said, I agree with the rest. The GM/Stanadyne marriage laid a goose egg. It certainly could have been better.

[moondoggie]

Good Day!

"And why were they bleeding out?" I'm certain beyond a shadow of doubt that we'll never know the complete answer to this question, regardless of how many insiders we know. There are > 300,000 people working for GM, & many were/are involved in both their successes AND failures. It was not my intent to excuse anything, as a re-read of my previous post will verify. It's just one of the very large number of things involved in the why of the situation.

Really, it will likely be a moot point soon. In all liklihood, we'll ALL be driving Toyotas & Nissans in 5 or 10 years, unless Detroit fixes what appears to me to be an impossible situation.

Blessings!
(signature in previous post)

[Bnave95]

I have always liked the idea of having a center point,source for grounding with out looping through verious points. At a younger age this was needed for Auto sounds systems or there would be problem with noise. Have not told or thought any one would agree that the grounds are connected by a common wire to any points where there is a ground. Meaning my truck.
Did I say that right? All grounding point's are connected by a common feeded wire to each point So all grounds are connected to each other.
No looping.

[Robyn]

Well sort of. All grounding should have a seperate wire running to the ground buss.
In theory the way the manufactures do it will work fine, unfortunately over time the daisy chain will develop a weak link and then things go sour.
The steel coach body (CAR) works well, unfortunately the many many places that one can find grounds cant always be uncovered to check if there is an issue.

Having a poor ground on a set of lights can cause a series of faults especially when you have delicate and sensitive electronics on board that dont like voltage coming from places that it was not supposed to.
To give an example, I had a ground wire in an HEI distributor break and this resulted not in poor running of the engine but instead the wipers would cycle about every 5 seconds.
Now that was a bummer to figure out. The only way I found it was the fact that it did not do this before I did a tune up and did so starting right after.
Some thoughtful time over a cup of coffee lead me back into the HEI and hence found the broken wire.

My reference to the grounding was that all pieces of electrical equipment have there own ground running back to a common ground buss.
Its costly and takes more time than simply screwing a terminal to the body with a sheet metal screw.
The engineering becomes more time consuming as does assembly and therfore costs more.

So much of what goes on in a truck factory has to be set up so things can progress in a logical fashion. Unfortunately this means that many things that we may need to get to to remove and repair are in a nasty place.

The wiring and piping on the back of our 6.5 diesel engines is all placed before the body goes on, oooops there goes any ease of servicability but to install this stuff afterwards would be almost impossible on an assembly line.

Original assembly cost is such a big factor.
This is why we cuss at things we have to remove and cant get tools to.

[tommac95]

Damork-
Waytekwire.com <http://www.waytekwire.com/> stocks/sells plenty Bosch relays , relay connectors ["something to hold the relays"] and the associated terminals. I have a paper catalog #219A which displays these items on pages 58-59 (maybe p60 too, 'micro relays'). Right now the online pdf cat doesn't play on my PC , but it probably normally does.

These relay connectors clamp/glide together (modular/extensible??) into convenient array. A few years ago when my vehicle was down for some maintenance your posts on adding relays inspired me to add about 8 , i can mail photos , but haven't mastered forum foto posts quite yet!

[Robyn]

Maverick
Bad choice of words on my part
Sure the ECM does all the thinking and running the show.
What I was alluding too and missed it I guess was that GM wanted all the controls (PMD) on the chassis and not where it ended up and Stanadyne would not have any part of it. Stanadyne was worried I guess about proprietary technology being stolen????
Sorry for the mix up
Robyn

[sailun]

Funny thing, I was selling a car to a gentleman who said he worked in the Stanadyne factory, making these pumps, way back when ! Said there was no way they could make enough pumps as their contract said they were supposed to, so there was no QC, just slap 'em together and ship 'em.

Since I'm up on my soap box:

When a new victim says he wants to buy one of these motors, why don't we all tell him to run away ?

Or make sure he also buys another car, to chase parts with, and get to work reliably ?

Or to join AAA, for the towing protection ?

Or buy a towing company, just to save some money ?

And especially to carry one spare of every electric component on the vehicle.

And re-wire, and re-engineer, and burn through brakes like water, and don't sit around idling, else you'll turn your starters into baked potatoes.

Sorry, it's been building up for years...............

[rjwest]

I wanted a more reliable truck, so ( Please don't ban me from the site I still have a 6.5) I bought a used cummins, 2002.

Guess what, they have an IP system that has worse problems than the 6.5,

At least with the 6.5l, when you get the PMD remoted and a spare, it's no real big deal to keep it running.
And the Pump VERY rarely quits completely.

Not so with the cummins 98-2002, they can 'quit'..
Hard to replace the IP along side the road. And they also have Lift pump problems.....

So , I never had tow insurance with a 6.5 or any other vehicle in my life, but went and got insurance for the dodge.

But I love the power and the 6sp trans...