I got the blinkin' beast running right!!
When I got it (June, 2007) I didn't know it, but it had a dead in-tank pump. Things were pretty good, for a non-turbo, but when I ran it out of fuel and got air into the lines my troubles started. Without a good tank pump, the IP boost pump just couldn’t quite do it. I was out of work and couldn’t see my way to $200 for the correct replacement, so I bought a Carter suck and blow pump and mounted it on the frame rail above the tank. That was able to purge the air.
Still, it didn’t run the way I remember the ones in the Army running (turbo vs non-turbo, sea level vs 5280 ft. ?). In the Army I wasn’t the one performing maintenance on the deuce (an M109) in our section, so I don’t know if it was a turbo or not. I do know it was fast enough to get a speeding ticket on a lonely jungle road between Dong Tam and My Tho, though.
I bypassed the fuel density compensator and in trying to adjust it as per the instructions, the bolt on the front of the FDC broke. Got it welded back together, but couldn’t find the sweet spot. In working on it, I made the NO-NO of re-using a cotter pin. It broke and turned a piece loose in the governor, resulting in several hours of filing and tapping. Got it back together and couldn’t make heads-or-tails out of the instructions for adjusting the FDC and the Governor, but is all the messing around I figured out that the shaft between the throttle linkage and the governor was sticky. More cleaning, etc. and messing with adjustments.
When we exhausted all that, it still ran like it was fuel starved, so I finally broke down and bought a genuine replacement pump from Olympic Controls Corp. It doesn’t exactly run like a striped a$%ed ape, but I think it is as good as poor thin air breather will get.
My advice: DON’T BUY ANY PUMP BUT THE REAL THING! I just wasted my $75.