I have a 2004 CAT303CR with the Mitsubishi engine. It has 1600 hours, and I have owned the machine for 4 years since it had about 1000 hours. Recently, it has been hard to start first thing in the morning, even on warmer mornings, and another problem that is new is that soon after starting but when the coolant is at normal operating temperature, if I put a load on the hydraulics, sometimes I can stall the engine. I'll put and hold the load on the hydraulics, and the machine will decrease power after a moment of being at full extension on the stick, or even if just rolling the tracks, and if I keep pressing into the load, it will sound like fuel gets cut off, and the machine dies. During the day of operating the machine it will not do this again past the first 10 minutes of operating, and if I back off the load in that first ten minutes of operation, it will resume full throttle. During the rest of the day, it does sound a little bit like the machine is working harder than it used to during normal hydraulic operations. Since the first symptom was a hard start, I replaced the glow plugs (one tested bad), and later I discovered bad voltage coming out of the glow plug relay timer, so I have replaced that. I replaced all of the fuel lines recently, since there were visible cracks in the exterior layer of the lines, and I put clear fuel hoses on the machine to look for air in the fuel lines and whether fuel pressure bled off overnight. There was no problem with that. I also replaced the air filter recently and both fuel filters - both before this problem started getting more apparent. Any ideas are appreciated.
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