Last night, I made use of my new Speedy Stitcher to repair the window on my salvageable door. It was my first try at it, so I made a bit of a mistake in getting the window perfectly lined up, but it doesn't look bad by any stretch and it opens and closes very easily. Some paraffin wax also went a long way to aid the zipper's movement. It's quite nice not having a trash bag over my door to keep rain water out!
Next up is I've still been working to resolve my no-start issue on the engine. I've dumped the couple of old gallons of diesel that were remaining and filled 5 fresh gallons, plus decided to replace the fuel filter and center water separator element. The center element looked fine, but the fuel filter and housing were definitely very fouled and replacement was well-timed. Bled the system to get fuel flowing again and I could see puffs of dark smoke at the exhaust with each compression, but no ignition... Air filter was checked to ensure fouling hadn't occured, and it was clean. Glow plugs are cycling correctly (physically inspected and resistance testing last time it ran about 1 mo ago) with about an 8 second WTS light on an S3. Best guess I have left is my crank speed. The A1 troubleshooting guide states a minimum crank speed of 150 RPM for a cold start. My batteries are in deteriorating condition and I only get about 40 seconds worth of cranking (in 2-3 separate bursts, mind you) before the power is drawn down to such an extent that it's clearly unusuable.
I'm charging up and rounding up all of the spare car batteries we have available to see if I can throw together a usuable battery bank and try to see if this is the real issue. While I work on this, is there anyone in the Indianapolis area that has a high quality battery charger, like a NOCO Genius, that I could borrow to see if my batteries can be revived? In the meantime, I've got feelers out at the local demil salvage yards to try and source a handful of low cost 6TL/6TMF/6TAGM batteries (which would still need a nice charger to bring them up to standard). Unfortunately the guy that could speak for the best lead (Bedford Recycling) is out until Monday, so I won't know until then if I have to look elsewhere.