Yesterday I did notice once that my Valmet 865 was a bit difficult to start, I had to hold the key quite long for it to start. Had never happended before, so did immediately call my farmer mentor Kåre, but he could not provide a clear answer other than check the fuel system. But, since it was running fine I was hoping that it was just a single event and that all was fine. But later in the evening when going out to clear the road, after about 10 minutes of hard work (hard for the tractor, not me off course) it suddenly died. I just had to forget about getting it started. Luckily both the front loader and the snow plow as lifted. So my neigbour Thomas to the rescue, he pulled the tractor back home to the barn
Luckily he is also a car mechanic so he helped me figure out what the most likely cause is. When bleeding the fuel system he noticed that it was air in it, but we did not immediately understand why. The tractor did actually start once after bleeding it the first time, but then it stopped again when I lifted the gas pedal. When he did some more thorough investigation he found out that the feed pump leaked some air and also did not respond well when pumping. That is, it should provide some more resistance along with the fact that it is clearly sweatting diesel along with air bubbles coming out around it when we did use it manually. And when opening the fuel pipe on the injection pump almost no diesel did flow when holding the key in starting postition. So the most likely cause is a broken feed pump. New one is soon to be on its way, along with new diesel filters. Hopefully it will start without issues once it has been replaced.