I've got a 99 Suburban 7.4 liter used for occasional towing duty. The engine runs smooth under all conditions, and starts right up when cold. Once you park it for a little while though, and try to start it again, it's gotta crank for a few seconds before it fires up.
I've read that the fuel pressure regulator could be the culprit here. That's apparently a quick repair on the 5.7 liter engine but on the 7.4 it looks to be a bit more involved; requires taking off the upper intake manifold. To boot it's a $70 or so part. So, I don't mind replacing it once this problem gets annoying enough but I'd rather test to verify that this is the problem before throwing parts at it.
There's a fuel line access port for relieving system pressure right out at the front of the engine that I can probably hook up a pressure gauge to if I need to test fuel system pressure, but I'm not sure that would do anything. Presumably the pressure is fine when it's running, since the thing runs just fine (I'd expect hesitation or rough running if the fuel pressure was off).
How can I go about testing for a situation like this? I wouldn't think I could get any helpful information from monitoring fuel pressure during startup but is that what I have to do?
I've read that the fuel pressure regulator could be the culprit here. That's apparently a quick repair on the 5.7 liter engine but on the 7.4 it looks to be a bit more involved; requires taking off the upper intake manifold. To boot it's a $70 or so part. So, I don't mind replacing it once this problem gets annoying enough but I'd rather test to verify that this is the problem before throwing parts at it.
There's a fuel line access port for relieving system pressure right out at the front of the engine that I can probably hook up a pressure gauge to if I need to test fuel system pressure, but I'm not sure that would do anything. Presumably the pressure is fine when it's running, since the thing runs just fine (I'd expect hesitation or rough running if the fuel pressure was off).
How can I go about testing for a situation like this? I wouldn't think I could get any helpful information from monitoring fuel pressure during startup but is that what I have to do?