It had to happen.

Philip has always been reliable. He's hauled us thousands of miles, tolerates being left in the backyard for 8 months a year, and starts up without a hitch each April or May. Until this year. To be fair, he started up just fine, and idled while the air compressor filled the tanks. Fast idle is about 1000-1100 RPM, so once the tanks are full, the idle drops to about 600 RPM. Not this year. Philip went from ~1100 to zero, and refused to start afterwards. Batteries are good and strong, air flow seems ok, so there's one other component: fuel. The negative (ground) wire on the fuel/water separator got REALLY hot (like smoking), and when I pulled out the filter and cranked the engine, I don't see fuel coming in. Time to troubleshoot fuel flow. First, I ordered a new filter (that's <$20, which is probably the least amount of money I'm going to get away with), and tomorrow I'm going to flush the whole separator. If the separator motor is shot, that's about $250 or so. Not cheap, but fairly easy to fix. If the problem is the injector pump, that's $900 and that would suck. I'm really hoping it's just a minor clog.