07/28/2026
Man im happier than a tornado in a trailer park! (Couldn’t help my Cars movie Reference) This truck has been a thorn in my side for two years. It came in with multiple issues and wouldn’t start. Previously, the customer had been driving home one night and it started to run poorly. After he had parked it  he tried to restart it, and it wouldn’t start up. The customer thought maybe it was the injection pump so he found one online and installed it himself. Still wouldn’t start so he towed it to us. After we had bled the injectors we tried to start it and even with a battery charger on it to help keep the battery up it just wouldn’t fire. Smoked but won’t run. We installed the semi jump pack on it and boy we had the cranking amps then. Started up smoked Terrible and didn’t run well at all. On the test drive even at half throttle it sounded like it was way over fueled and low on power. We figured base engine problem. We performed a compression test and it was bad. The highest cyl was 300psi and the second highest was 200 and the lowest was 145. This engine needs a minimum of 300 psi and wants I believe 480psi of compression. We found our issue. After removing the engine and disassembly, we found multiple cyls that must of had water in them. All the cyls had pitting from rust. We found out this truck had recently been purchased, and it had been sitting outside for a long period of time this truck also has exhaust stacks. My guess is the rain got into the exhaust, filled up the pipes and spilled into the engine through the exhaust manifolds and open exhaust valves.  We sent the engine off to a machine shop for repair. We did not see that engine back for eight months 😭. After a lot of machine work to both the block, the crank and the heads I finally got it back together. As u can see I opted to run this engine on a run stand. If you have the option to do this, it helps to find any problems after the rebuild and is way easier to deal with out of the vehicle. Usually, I find oil leaks at oil galley, plugs that the machine shop is supposed to take care of. Thank the lord I did it this way because I found two plugs on the back of the engine that are leaking.🤬 I would’ve had to either pull the transmission or pull the engine back out after just putting it in the vehicle. This a long story sorry. Anyway after mocking this engine up on the run stand I got it all ready to start but it wouldn’t run. I got lots of smoke but it won’t run. I made up
a couple glow plug harnesses and added that to the mix. Finally started, smokes like a house on fire, won’t idle, lopes like it’s got a big cam in it. Got it up to 150 degrees coolant temp and it would idle but terrible, big lope up and down.  I played with the injection pump timing. It didn’t matter where I put it. It starts the same. It runs the same and if you rev it up it sounds like it’s dumping a enormous amount of fuel all the time which is probably why it’s smoking. After I shut it off I came back 20 minutes later and I had puddles underneath the engine. Found out that it’s dumping so much fuel It’s literally running out of the exhaust manifold.  I thought maybe I had base timing messed up or injection pump gear timing messed up. I took the front of the motor apart a couple of different times double checking triple checking I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I did a compression test I had 400 pounds of compression even though the motor is not really broken in yet that was pretty good. I know we worked on a diesel welder recently. It had a bad injection pump and the customer that owned that welder talked about BK Diesel out of Dubuque.  if you didn’t know BK Diesel out of Dubuque is one of the only Diesel shops in our area that can physically do testing on injection pumps or injectors. For troubleshooting issues, I reached out to them. They gave me some ideas, we made attempts. It made no change. I got fed up and finally removed the injection pump and the injectors, boxed everything up and sent it to them. Mind you this injection pump doesn’t have 50 miles on it. It’s supposedly a reman injection pump. After a couple of weeks at BK Diesel, I did get a call from Steve and he let me know that this pump was in really bad shape. I’m not gonna go into the details as to what was wrong with the pump, but they basically overhaul the pump then retested everything and sent it back. As of todayI finally got it all back together. It started and ran perfectly. 😁. This post is to let folks know that just because it’s supposedly a new part doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean it to works perfectly and doesn’t mean it can’t cause issues. Cool heads prevail and it’s not always the mechanics fault. This job did make question why I’m in this business. I guess patience is a virtue for all. Stay cool everyone!
