April Blog
May 3, 2024
As I write this month’s news letter I’m sitting in a bus heading from Project Canaan to the Johannesburg airport. This was not a planned
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As we transition out of winter into spring here in the Southern Hemisphere, the weather is starting to warm up during the day. Daylight is coming earlier and staying later, giving us hope that summer is just around the corner.
The new shop/training centre is going up quickly and looks great. I took an unguided tour through it the other day and that thing is huge! We might need a moving sidewalk like the airports have to get around. It will be so nice to not need to put vehicles back together in order to bring the next one in while we wait for parts.
Speaking about getting parts, they are still a work in progress. As a North American auto tech I am used to easy access to all my parts from multiple suppliers, and this makes waiting for parts here very hard to do. This has always been a major problem for past short term volunteers because their time “on the ground” was always limited. Now that I live here, my time can become more flexible and I am learning how to wait, not always patiently but learning to wait. As my African friends say, “we will make a plan.”
We have started to celebrate the workers at Lusito with cakes made by the Project Canaan kitchen as we work to build morale among our team members. We will celebrate each team member’s birthday and we recently had the privilege of celebrating Masebenza Malinga as he was married in July. It is cool to see the team start to come together as a unit.
We are using the NAPA Centre of Excellence training that our friends in Ontario are allowing us to use as education material for our technicians. This is such a blessing because the material is bite size, usually less than two hours in length, and there is a printable diploma which the guys love to show at the successful completion of the course.
Construction is going on all around Project Canaan, including our new home. The walls are going up and it seems every day there is noticeable growth of the building. It is exciting to see it taking shape. We are looking forward to hosting teams of volunteers who will come and share their skills and talents with the people of Eswatini.
(By the way, we have a generous donor who will match donations towards our Guesthouse Project up to a total of $10,000. This offer ends August 31, so please visit our Donation Page if you wish to contribute!)
Ross’s Tech Corner:
You had to know that there was going to be a technical story to come out of this month as well. Our challenge came from a Caterpillar D5 Dozer with a 3126 six cylinder that had a dead misfire. The machine threw a code for injector 5. Simple, eh? Well, the injector is special order this side and the cost will be $1500.00 if you don’t get the core back in time.
We thought it would be a good idea to make sure that the injector was indeed the problem. The number five injector had an ohmic value of 1.8 ohms while all the other injectors measured at 3.5 ohms; hmm, starting to sound like one of these things is not like the other.
This is a 110 volt piezoelectric injection system, so the current flow on the good injectors was 30 amps but injector 5 was 58.8 amps, which likely caused the ECU to shut down. We were now confident that this was a bad injector solenoid, so we purchased one in the US for $100.00 shipping included. That should have been the end of this unit, but I made a huge mistake by not shutting off the fuel when we took it apart. This is a HEUI Hydraulically Actuated Electronic Unit Injection system which allows the fuel and oil to mix when the injector is removed. The next morning we found a lot of fuel and oil mixed on the ground and a hydraulically locked up engine. We drained the oil and sucked the fuel out of the cylinders, installed the repaired injector, and fired it up; all was good.
Sometimes in life when you think you have things all figured out, something comes along to trip you up. Every day is a school day here.
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.
Ross MacPherson, African Field Director
Mercy Tech Mission
As I write this month’s news letter I’m sitting in a bus heading from Project Canaan to the Johannesburg airport. This was not a planned
Most days the Lusito shop is running at full capacity! What a blessing this fantastic facility is to our work here at Project Canaan. Days
We all know how fast lightning hits, then is over. So did February here. In a flash we are already into March moving forward