Sprig said:
Good thread gents!
It is a good thread!
Cold starts are always a trick and a half.
Either is just way to dry to get in the habit of using, holding an unburning propane torch in the in the in-take is a little nicer to the engine as it doesnt wash the oil off of the cylinder walls. New glow-plugs and a good fresh battery with well serviced connections may be the cheapest insurance. But a tired engine with border-line compression and marginal injectors is going to be hard to start.
Along with engine oils getting thicker and harder to crank, cold air is just hard to get the engine to fire. Cold also makes the electron exchange in the battery slower, lowering the available amperage. About the best way to get a little more snort out of a cold battery is to hook up a trickle charger that is made to keep batteries up, if it has an "automatic" feature, it wouldn't hurt the battery if it were plugged in all the time the engine is shut-down. The activity of a trickle charger takes the chill out of a battery giving it way more "umpth" for cranking.
There is a trick that sometimes works to get a little more out of a cold start, just turning the lights on for about 20 seconds, and back off, the draw of the lights will sometime give just enought warmth to a cold battery, this trick will prove it's self if your ever trying to start a gas engine that dose not have enought juice to spark the plugs, the extra warmth will sometime be just the trick to get that extra volt.
A some day toy for me would be an old John Deere 70 D , they have a V-4 pony engine for a starter, that tapes into the coolant warming the main engine, and the pony exhaust is the big engines intake. If it's too cold to start "starter-engine" it's too cold to work!