Hi all! New member and owner here in Washington state. I just took delivery of a 1993 Daihatsu Hijet Lift/Dump with the EF-CS engine. The plan is for it to be a useful vehicle here on our home property, as well as fun little cruiser. My wife and I took it on a 20 mile cruise this evening and stopped for dinner along the way. Everything seemed to be in decent working order. However, after eating dinner the truck wouldn't fire up right away — there were four separate red dash lights that lit up when I turned the key and it took about 4 attempts to get the engine to turn over. Any ideas on what the 4 lights meant and the relationship to the starting difficulty? Looking forward to learning more!
Welcome aboard! You're ahead of me, as I'm still a few weeks away from choosing my minitruck. It's a good job your Daihatsu fits in to the back seat of your other truck :-D
PNW, welcome aboard. Post some pictures. If you haven’t owned a mini with a dump bed before, you won’t realize how much easier they are to work on. Because you can raise the bed, and undo the engine protection plate to access the top of the engine as opposed to trying to work through the hatch in the bed. But, before you work on it with the bed raised, you should get a ram support made up so you can block the hydraulic cylinder. Mine is just a piece of angle iron cut to fit in between the top of the cylinder and the bed mount with the bed fully raised. Guys at the local steel supplier/fabricator made it up when I bought the steel. I drove in and lifted the bed to measure for what I was going to need, and the owner came out to check out my mini, and decided he would measure it up, and make it for the cost of the steel, because it only took about a minute of welding. Plus, he thought he owed me a favor, because I gave him a simple marketable idea for putting wheels on snow plows during the off-season. Please go into your profile page and put some information on your truck into your signature line. (You can get there by clicking on your name below your avatar.). It makes it a lot easier to give you advice when you need it, if we know what your running and any mods you have made.
Thanks Jigs! The comment about securing the bed while lifted is a great reminder, thanks! I thought I had the info in my signature but then realized I had it under "my personal details" section...should be good to now. Any thoughts on the question I in the OP? Without a manual I wasn't able to decipher what the lighting of the 4 individual lights on the cluster meant, especially in relation to the inability to get the engine to turn over. After it finally turned over it did idle a little low but had no trouble driving for another 5 minutes. I turned the engine off and then back on, to see if I could replicate the issue, and it fired right up no problem. Since then I haven't seen the same issue. I searched the various forums here for someone who might have a similar issue, or least to get an idea of what it could mean, but I couldn't find anything relating to the specific issue.
