Evening folks! Been helping out a friend with a Merc A170 (diesel). Long story short, the car has been out of action for about 6 months but left low on fuel. I put about 12 litres of fuel in it and made sure it was TOTALLY airlock free (transparent pipe).

Car initially starts and has a VERY uneven tickover and won't rev, in the mean time belching out white smoke. Car stalls after 10 secs and then refuses to start even with a few squirts of easy-start. Car was running well before being put in storage.

I have cleaned out a very dirty EGR valve and don"t want to attack the inlet housing but would that cause erratic tickover and horrendous white smoke cloud?

ANY advice would be warmly welcomed. BTW, the coolant levels are correct, no mayonnaise in oil or rust in water/coolant...

Thanks
Andy

Not sure, but clouds of white smoke and uneven tick over including struggling to rev was a problem I had on my old mondeo , was a stuck open /jammed injector, allowing diesel to go into the cylinder all the time, meant the diesel was being burnt in the exhaust from the heat of the other 3 cylinders.

Adrian

I've seen white smoke from a diesel once before and that was with my Seat Alhambra which had an auxiliary heater which ran off diesel which was not burning properly.

A stuck injector sounds plausible and could lead to serious damage due to hydraulic lock. I'm not sure how you would go about fixing it other than to replace the injectors or have them tested or perhaps to get one known-good injector and replace each existing injector in turn until you find the bad one. A fault code reader might also be able to detect the failed injector.

With egr being filthy the inlet will be as well. It may be blocked so worth taking it off and cleaning it out.

Have you primed the high pressure pump? There should be a manual lift pump somewhere in the engine bay to do the job as the high pressure pump won't pick up without priming. Check YouTube for bleeding diesel engines.
Had to do this on our Rav4, took 5 cycles of prime and turn over until the engine started. Our primer was a three inch circular piece with a black rubber push button in the middle on top of the fuel filter housing.

Disconnect the leak off pipes from each injector and measure what each injector is returning, you might find one is a lot more than others and this will be the faulty one. Prob easier to you tube the procedure than me try to explain it. Just need some pipe and drill bits to blank off where needed. When they are really bad it will show up on cranking.