Thread: TD5 mis-firing and surging (i think)

short story(as short as I can make it).

Brother's Td5 caused us no end of headscratching for a while.

Started out(I think about mid Jul/Aug) with a rough running engine.
He had the D2 since about Jan .. so 6-7months .. ran beautifully(but loud, with straight through exhaust).
Then about Jul/Aug(as I remember) it started running rough.
He changed MAF, things ran a bit better for a short while(maybe a week or two), then back again.
Nanocom showed nothing to blame. MAF numbers seemed good, etc.
So he also then changed injector loom, no oil at the ECU, very small amount at the front plug out the head.

Then a few days later it got worse again, not just rough, and slight surging, but barely any power.
Not having an oscilloscope, nor the brains to test the fuel pump under load, we changed fuel filter, non return valve, changed fuel pump and bled fuel.
No change .. got worse again! Then he noticed fuel dripping from FPR .. so new FPR.
(he was going nuts on the cost of it all in such a short time span too!)
New FPR, and then the drama really hit.

With all these new parts, the once stuttering and surging issue, which at one point seemed to sort itself .. became a total shutdown issue(after a few minutes of driving).
Note that the engine would shut down after a few minutes driving, not engine running.
We worked out that if speed was kept below 60k/h, the shut down wouldn't occur.

ie. car was acting very strange .. one day it'd be fine, next day playing up.
Somewhere in there the surging also became a result of the WGM being defective too, and I had his car at my place, changed that power felt good, car running nice hit the freeway to his place, and then it started all over again!
Not far from his place it just randomly shut down.. ie. like no fuel.

So got to his place, and early Jan or thereabouts we finally had the time(both) to start on the injector seals.
Went on a tentative drive, me following in my D1, and after an hour or so, with engine running like it should we decided that "it was now sorted".
That was Jan this year, and other than a worn torque converter issue, TD5 has been pulling strongly ever since.

So all that mucking about, and then me taking a few weeks to test every wire to and from the ECU(which I thought surely was the issue) .. turned out that it was injector seals.

So all this on again off again random rough running, surging, and then finally total shutdown was due to injector seals all along(as had been advised by this forum quite early on).

Do yourself a favour and do them, that way you know they're eliminated from the equation!
They're not expensive parts to do, and you need about an hour or two of time to do them.
You don't need an injector puller, we used half a multigrip and jiggled them out. 4 were easy, one slightly harder.

This is going to be a lot easier(mainly on the wallet) than chasing ECU and other possible electrical issues.

My issues appear to have disappeared once I changed the injector washers.

I am holding final judgement till I've done a few hundred kms, but after just over 100, it's running nice. Still appears to be running rough at certain rpm, but otherwise no surging.

The plus about all this is that I now have alot more specific knowledge of the engine wiring and specifics.

Thanks everyone for your advise and assistance. Much appreciated.