By Tony K
The electronics on my diesel are starting to show their age and rather than spend a bunch of time and money I am just going to convert the glow plugs and the on/off of the injection pump to full manual control. Push or pull the pump on and a momentary switch for the glow plugs and I will be good to go.
Since I already have a momentary switch in the dash all I have to do is re-route some wire. Also it’s a good idea to change the glow plugs to a higher voltage model so they are harder to burn out if you leave the switch on for too long. Still need to change the wiring but swapped out the glow plugs to 10.5V ones and have started looking for a cable connection for the injection pump. Thought the pump was going to be easy but the on/off lever is made of some non drillable stuff so I need to hook to the factory location and this requires a specific size of ball joint fitting that I couldn’t find today. But I did get the cable routed so thats a good thing at least.
Also learned something else about my injection pump, pull off the electronic controls and much to my surprise the pump moves to the run position. This is a good feature to have in case something ever goes wrong. The rig will still run and all you have to do to shut it off is move the lever with your hand. Didn’t know about this before.
-Off the Deep End-
To say I like things simple is an understatement. Overly complicated systems just create problems down the road and usually that road is not in a good place. As you can see in the first pic Toyota got a little carried away with the electronic controls for my diesel. All that just to turn on the injection pump and glow plugs. It has all been replaced with a much simpler manually (meaning me) controlled set up, one momentary switch and a push/pull cable.
There is no going back now as I pulled all the electronic components tonight and replaced them with a solenoid, some fuses and some wire. I tried to wire in the control motor for the fuel shut off but it required more than just a switch so out it came and I chose to replace all the wiring to the glow plugs with a much simpler set up. So now the glow plugs are manual operation only.
The solenoid is hooked to the main power buss with a 50 amp fuse. An 8awg wire then goes right to the glow plug buss bar. A momentary toggle controls the solenoid from the dash. If you don’t know what a momentary switch is, it is spring loaded to the on or off position. In my case to the off side of things, holding it on supplies power to the glow plugs. 
No more funky chicken when I hit the key. One click of the solenoid and the plugs start to get hot. Boy do I like it set up this way.
Hopefully get the shutdown/run cable hooked to the injection pump in a couple of days. But for now I get to open the hood to shut it off….
-Full Manual-
Managed to get my shut down cable installed today. Noticed a couple of bolts in the intake manifold that looked promising for a mount point for the cable housing. It turned out to be really simple to mount a plate to the holes in the intake. My guess is that any 3B that had factory manual controls used this same location to hold the cable housing. Have to check with my buddy Rob to see how his BJ42 shuts down as his doesn’t have the super glow system that I removed.
The hardest part of all this was finding a way to hook the stop/run lever on the injection pump to the wire inside the cable housing. Finally took apart the original rod that hooked the EDIC motor to the pump and used the end to fit over the ball joint. Next I had to machine a small part that bolts to the old end and has a hole and set screws to clamp down on the wire.
Now that it is all hooked up I don’t have to open the hood for shutdown. The cable shut down works great and there is no longer a lag as the old electronics decided what to do once I turned the key to off.
As for a glow plug timer I have a simple one, the seat belt buzzer has a tendency to run on so I just hold my glow plugs on for the buzzer plus a bit more and she starts right up. Sure do like my simple system over the old one. Far less to go wrong and nothing I can’t fix on the trail.
