Bleeding tdci fuel tips

Hi all,

I'm a newbie on this forum, but having experienced a problem and found no solution either here or anywhere else that Google took me thought I'd describe:

I drained the water from my fuel filter as part of service, and afterwards could not start due to air in fuel. Consulting trusty haynes I then tried bleeding fuel with hand prime pump. To cut a long story short, I pumped and pumped that sucker, and each time would see it drawing up fuel with bubbles and then pushing it straight back towards high pressure pump. Call to a friendly Ford Mechanic (retired) sorted me out.

"Those Fiesta 1.4 tdci s are buggers for airlocking, we had problems with almost all that came off the boat (to Guernsey) because the factory sent them out with too little fuel".

First trick, make sure it's at least half full of fuel (it was) and hand pump for 5 minutes, leave for at least 2 hours or overnight, pump again then start. This one did not work for me.

Second trick, raise the back as high as possible (in my case push so that back is up hill, chock wheels then jack up back onto axle stands). Now try pumping again. Did this and it worked a treat. This time I could see fuel with bubbles being drawn up, but clean fuel replacing it on return to high pressure.

Hope this helps someone.

Rob