Surprisingly (I check each time before I start it), no water in the oil yet, although I did have an "Oh ****!!!!!!" moment a week or so ago.
Getting it started has become an increasingly long and drawn-out process each time because there's always something new wrong with it. Up to now having to run a jumper wire to the fuel injector pump and apply power to the solenoid directly.
One time when it wasn't quite this bad to start and I could still start it from inside, if I had the charger and marine battery connected to it and only needed to run juice through the stereo amp's power lead to get the cab working, I fired it up and watched in fascination as all the muddy water was getting sprayed all over the place by the fan, it not registering on me until it died that it was pouring buckets of the stuff into the air intake since the hood was open.
I muttered some obscenities, then decided if damage was done, it was already done (as in a pretzeled connecting rod), closed the hood as best I could with the jumper cables attached, crossed my fingers, and turned the key.
Fortunately it started.
A bigger ordeal was when I initially got it stuck and was only halfway turned to the current position, but the lean angle was pretty enormous. Ran low enough on fuel that it wasn't picking any up because of the angle.
I'm sure you know what an enormous pain it is when that happens. So I had to haul a bunch of fuel down 5 gallons at a time, then found that when I was going through the normal restart procedure (which I'd only done ONCE before on this thing in 7 years of owning it-- I quickly learned not to let it get low), I found that the fuel pump plunger was basically a lever that moved up and down freely. That's how the battery charger ended up down there to begin with.
Had to crank the engine with a couple of the injector fittings cracked open until I could see fuel showing up, got it started on 2 cylinders and the other two showed up pretty quickly after.
Keeping my fingers crossed that my credit will be approved (probably looks awful -- 3 of our cars are less than a year old, with 2 of them being barely a month old) and the rented excavator will be here tomorrow. First job will be to dig even deeper through the dam, as the backhoe is now just as full of water as it was before. It's sitting in what would be the middle of a decent-sized pond.
