Navara sucked some water - safe or not ?

[Shannow]

We've had ridiculously rainfall through here the last weeks.

The last week we had 7" (remember, it's unseasonal for here).

Children had a Christmas party, out at work, and We took the opportunity to drive to our regional dams, and watch the volumes of water flowing over one, and the 15 foot rise in level over a week in another.

Drainage designed for normal rainfall, years of poor maintenance of roads (cover in tar and stone and sweep the excess off the side of the road into the drains) made for heaps of standing water, no more than a few inches deep.

Anyway, while travelling through standing water (maybe 3" on passenger side, half that on driver's side)..25m stretch, at 20-25MPH tops (limit is 30)...truck was throwing a fair bit of water.

Exited the water, started accelerating up a hill,and the car faltered. Felt like a spark ignition engine with drenched electrics losing power...except this is a direct injection diesel...accompanied with some white smoke (don't know whether fuel or steam). No knocking, or stopping, just a couple of seconds of lack of power.

I dipped the clutch and dropped it to idle, and all seemed well. A little water out the swirl pot in the air intake, and a few drips out of the main filter body. Nothing that looks like mass water ingestion.

Vehicle ran like a top for the rest of the day.

Nissan in their wisdom have the air intake behind a plastic panel in the passenger side wheel well, and water surely got into the intake.

I'm thinking that to hydraulic it would take nearly 1/5 cup on a single cylinder cycle, and is pretty unlikley that the turbo would have allowed that much in without failure.

On spark ignition engines, I've poured water and other cleaners through the intake and the amounts to stop the engine are far short of that required to lock it.

Any thoughts ?

 

[XS650]

1. Possibly you sucked in enough water to cool off the compression cycle to where you got incomplete combustion for a few seconds without hydro-locking it. You can "hydro-lock" it without breaking it, you usually bend a connecting rod a bit. The resulting loss of compression will cause that cylinder to run poorly if at all so if all seems well, you prolly didn't do that.

2. Are there any electronics involved in controlling your injection that might have been effected?

 

[JimPghPA]

Could be that like XS650 wrote, the engine cooled enough to prevent the diesel compression cycle from being hot enough to work in some cylinders.

And/or:

Could of fast cooled a cylinder or cylinders, and caused them to have too much friction around the piston.

Many years ago when I had a beater of a street/trail motorcycle, some of my friends and I took it trail riding in the winter. We would hit the cylinder with an extra large snow ball when someone was riding by and cause the cylinder to fast cool and grab the piston. The engine would loose power and about half the time it would stall. After a few seconds the engine would run fine again. The chalange was to hit it good enough to stall the engine so the rider had to kick start it. But it was also fun to hit it good enough that the rider had to come to a stop for a few seconds to wait for the engine to run with enough power to make the bike go, even if it did not stall.

We put many more years of using that enine trail riding after that, so I guess the abuse of hitting the cylinder with big snow balls did not cause significant harm. Like I said it was a beater.

 

[Shannow]

Yep, it's a computer controlled injection pump.

Computer adjusts the rotary pump in terms of timing and delivery.

There's also a couple of solenoids that operate various butterflies in the intake to control egr (disabled), swirl during EGR (disabled), and air cut-off on shut-down.

Started and ran like a charm, so may have been lucky.

Reading on the Navara forums, they've been known to hydraulic after about 1km on flooded roads in the NT (where it really DOES rain), and is the main reason people fit snorkels to the things out there.

 

[fdcg27]

If it ran right after this brief event, and it still runs right, I'd say its okay.
If you had bent a rod, I think you'd feel the difference.
Of course, the bent rod would also likely break fairly soon.
It sounds like all is well, and you were lucky.

 

[01rangerxl]

If it runs fine now, forget about it. It drank some water and burned it off..as long as it didn't hyrdolock you are good.

 

[Shannow]

Took it for an 80 mile round trip today for some Christmas shopping.

Ran well, no funny stuff.

Thanks guys.

 

[Shannow]

Took some pre/post emptive action the other weekend.

The original air intake was in the inner guard, around 8" forward of where the snorkel enters the outer guard.
Heaps more intake noise, but the ram air effect seems to be around half a gear at highway speeds.

After fitting, my hands looked like I'd been wrestling a box full of ferrets, but prolly should have done it ages ago.

My Son's (5yo) face to come home from the shops and seen a 90mm hole in the side of the car was priceless.

 

[Nick R]

I'd say you'd probably be fine. I don't know if you remember, but when I did the headgasket job on the cavalier, we put one of the coolant/EGR manifold gaskets in wrong, and it filled the engine with water, and resulted in not quite hydrolocking (Since it ran) but it was full of water and didn't run very well. Took the spark plug out and had dad crank it... Was dumb and didn't cover my face or lean back and got a ton of gas mixed water blasted into my face. That was fun..... Anyway if it survived that, I would think that you're little bit of water ingestion would be fine. The water probably flashed to steam and simply inhibited combustion for a moment or two.

 

[dailydriver]

You had(?) the 'Roo Bar' on there already (right?), I am suprised you did not have the snorkel as well.

Just keep listening for the dreaded 'rod knock'.

But as others have mentioned, you probably would have noticed it by now, or seen symptoms.

 

[Shannow]

Yep, Roos are a fact of life here.

Tey even thrive on the power station sites that I work on...the bar was a must.

Never planned on fording 3-4" of standing water 'though.