>     82 Diesel Vanagon. After a lot of hard starting I finally couldn't
>get it going and the battery was draining, so I found two shot glow
>plugs and replaced them.  After another episode of hard starting off
>another battery, it finally fired and seemed to cough up a monster-
>sized "hairball of smoke."
>After hard starting with no combustion, is this normal?

Yes. It was white smoke, right? THat's just all the unburnt diesel
mist you created before it fired.

>It took a little while to totally clear up and now seems fine, but I am
>still concerned about the hard starting and the crazy exhast.

You mean it now starts easy?

A starting tip: Keep the cold start lever in, then pull it out only
when the engine fires. In cold weather this helps by delaying
injection and thus reducing the cooling effect of the diesel mist in
the precombustion chamber during cranking.

/m
--
Martin Jagersand                 email: jag@cs.yale.edu
Computer Science Department             jag@cs.rochester.edu
Yale University

        Slow down and visit the VW diesel Westy page:
          WWW: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/jag/vw
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