Snow Gum - Manual Engine Start for Volvo Penta D2-75 - Garcia Exploration 45

It's great to have push buttons and gauges out in the cockpit for the Volvo Penta D2-75 diesel engine, but what happens if the electronics have a day off? Here is a demonstration of how to start the engine manually. Hopefully it's not an emergency when you need to do this, but it'll probably feel like one if the engine didn't start when you wanted it to. We keep the short wire we made up for jumping the relay socket in the second drawer in the galley. Two of them actually. You need this to be handy. Keep in mind that a paper clip will do the job if needed. Edit: Once the engine has started you can remove the cable. What are the symptoms of a faulty MDI box? For us, it was the engine stopping for no apparent reason. The MDI was generating its own 'Stop' commands, as if the stop button had been pushed. The engine did what it was told. I noticed that the helm engine control panel had switched off. Upon restarting it, the display went haywire, with random fault codes flashing rapidly, before it went off again. Wisely, Carolyn suggested that we let it rest for 10 minutes. I thought, 'Don't be silly!', but it worked. The control panel came on normally and the engine started. It died again an hour or so later, so we left it off until we needed it to enter port the next morning. Volvo replaced the MDI box and we've had no further trouble with it. Some long-distance cruisers carry a spare.