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Fuel Pump Lubrication A Conversation about Fuel Pump Lubrication taken from the DTLC From: "Dana Adams" <fj40dana@hotmail.com>
Hmmmm.... So reducing the sulphur content
will also affect the rubber seals as well as
There are a number of additives
available here in the states for diesel.
I've heard of using ATF, but that it's bad because it will cause coking. I've heard of using 2-cycle
oil, better for burning, and obviously good for
Other choices? comments? thaks Dana Steve Fox wrote and posted this to the DTLC. To me it's interesting reading about Bosch Fuel Pumps and fuel pump lubrication... The sulfur is not the lubricant (though this is the common wisdom)...the process used to remove the sulfur (for emissions reasons) kills the lubricity of the fuel, and nobody is forcing the fuel companies to restore that lubricity. It's the absent lubricity of low-sulphur diesel fuel that hurts the seals (and the metal, though that takes longer to show up). The additives sold that restore the lubricity to the fuel contain all kinds of stuff: Here's what Stanadyne's additives
are advertised to do:
and here's what the "lubricity
formula" contains, according to Stanadyne's MSDS data sheet:
and the "performance formula":
So, if some smart guy out there can tell us which of the ingredients is the lubricity improver, which is the cetane improver, which is the injector cleaner, etc., and which of the ingredients (stoddard solvent!?) is readily available (or perhaps too nasty to handle outside of manufacturing facilities!), it might be possible to come up with a reasonable homebrew additive to hit the two major areas that modern diesel fuel falls down on...lubricity and cetane. Once again, adding something
like ATF or 2-cycle oil that isn't engineered for use in a diesel fuel
pump might do as much harm as good...just because a trucker puts ATF in
his fuel, doesn't mean your pump will live with it. Engineers get
paid a lot of money to evaluate how something works in a particular mechanism,
and once they've come up with a workable formula, the marketing guys get
paid a lot of money to promote the good that product does and hide from
you the ingredients that are actually doing the work. Why should
they make it easy for you to buy a generic substitute...and why should
you assume that something that lubricates a transmission or two-stroke
engine is actually not doing more harm than good? You can kill the
NV4500 5-speed transmission found in Dodge Cummins pickups really quick
by putting normal gear lube in it instead of the specific lube they call
for, because that transmission's synchros will actually be eroded by some
of the ingredients in normal hi!
I still don't know what I'm talking about, but there are people who do, and if you search you'll find what they've written... I have no affiliation with anybody who makes money from diesel fuel, additives or anything else related to this, but I've seen the inside of injection pumps that somebody didn't have much respect for... Steve Fox
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After spending many quality hours with my local pump guy building a couple of Bosch VE's (and tearing down several sad cores looking for good parts), he definitely got the message across that lubrication is key to the long-term life of an injection pump. The pressures built inside a pump and the extremely close tolerances a pump is built to, to even do it's job at all, make good lubrication essential. Ask the Dodge guys with Cummins 6BT's about what the process to make EPA-driven low-sulpher fuel has done to the normally innate lubricity of the fuel...as evidenced by a lot of expensive pumps dying before their time. Stanadyne sells a lot of fuel additive as a result! Now, an inline pump is much less vulnerable to low-lubricity in a fuel, depending on the moving parts that are in the fuel stream in a particular pump...but delivery valves and injectors are still at risk. A rotary pump is lubricated entirely by the fuel that literally all it's moving parts run in. I'm just saying that there's
no engineering or quality control in the home-brew bio-diesel fuels...they
might be fine, but there are so many things a diesel will happily burn
that you know the lubricity of all those different fuels has got to be
all over the map...and the only testing that gets done is in YOUR pump,
and they aren't cheap. It's $500 US labor alone to rebuild a VE,
plus lots of $100 and $300 parts inside. I'm not saying that biodiesel
is bad, or that anyone shouldn't run it...heck, it might be better for
a pump that the current dry crap that no seems to mind selling as diesel...I'm
just saying that before you run in that direction as a miracle waiting
to happen, do your research and understand the risks. A diesel motor
will burn the darnedest things (heard of a guy, ex-Cummins engineer, who
ran his house off-grid with an Old 5.7 diesel on cast-off ATF!), but that
doesn't mean the pump will live doing it. I'd like to see the fuel
companies (notice I didn't !
Standard Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'll tell you what I think! Steve Fox
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