Alright, so a couple of weeks ago, I put together my new engine for my truck, and got it running:
That engine is a '93 7.3 that I had gotten with my turbo. It apparently ran when that truck it was in got smashed. It then sat for several years before I got it.

When I got into it, there was a slight bit of rust inside the cyls, which I removed, but everything moved fine. Nothing was loose, though there was a *lot* of oil sludge everywhere; I'm guessing someone didn't change their oil correctly for quite a while.

Anyway, I cleaned the pan, oil cooler, heads, and oil pump. I did not touch the block.
I had the valve seats ground, and new valves put in. The new valves were ground to match the seats.
I put the heads back together, and all of the springs had good pressure. I checked several of them when out of the engine, and they had the appropriate free length.

I used Victor Reinz head gaskets, and installed a set of 7.3 ARP headstuds. I've torqued them to 110 ft/lbs.

I installed a Typ4 Torque Cam in this engine. It's keyed to the gear, and that key was in place properly.
I installed it lining up the dots on both the cam and the crankshaft(not the Y).

I installed the best 16 used lifters of the 32 I had(16 from this engine and 16 from another parts engine). They all seemed to work correctly, and were well oiled before reinstalling.

I cleaned all of the pushrods and checked that they were not bent, installed them copper-dome side up.

After putting the major components together, I slapped an old set of injectors, an old IP and lines on it, hooked it up to a jerry can and made sure it ran(see the video above).

Now, this weekend I swapped it into my truck. I carefully rotated the engine until the IP stud was facing straight up, marked the flywheel at that spot, and then pulled the old IP & cover. I cleaned, added silicone and installed my 'good' pump in the correct spot, and set the timing to the static timing mark.

I got everything together, start it up, and it sounds bad... it sounded like a V8 gasser -- no fuel clatter at all. It was also smoking huge clouds of white(unburnt fuel) smoke.

I ended up moving it a couple teeth more advanced, then back to what I think is about one or two teeth advanced of where it was, and dynamically timed it.
After timing it, it's stopped smoking white, but it's smoking huge clouds of light bluish smoke. Constantly.
It's also got a distinct clatter to it, and sounds very much like a direct-injection diesel. I took it out on the road and got very little power out of it... it just felt like about 50hp or so -- easily half of what a NA engine should be able to do, if not less.

When I revved it up into the 2500 range, I got /some/ power out of it; my Banks turbo kit I swapped onto it was spooling and helping significantly, but still it was 1/4 of what it should be doing. And it's still smoking tons of blue smoke.


So, my question is this: What could be wrong?
1. Cam timing. If the cam was one tooth retarded, the IP would also be retarded. I lined the cam gear mark up as best I could with the one from the one from the crank, but perhaps it's supposed to be offset slightly? I've seen pictures showing that mark slightly off when the crankshaft mark was straight up.

2. Lifters. I can tell that all of my rockers are moving, and it looks like about the same amount each, but perhaps it's not enough. I'd think, however, that if lifters were the issue I'd have a loping as not all of them would be working the same way.

3. Fuel. I've thought about fuel timing, but I know how it sounds retarded and advanced from other trucks, including the previous engine here. The IP should be good, because it was running the previous engine just fine. Injectors are new(as of a month or less ago).

4. Oil pressure. I don't have a gauge handy, but I do know I'm pumping oil around, and when I first tested it I had it come out of the forgotten-to-be-blocked-off 1/8NPT port on the side where the turbo line goes.

What else can/should I look at?


BTW -- this truck is at my parents place, so I can't break into it until Friday night.

Any thoughts?

 

I know that R&Ds cam has to be installed one tooth off, IDK if this is true for the Type4 but worth asking.

 

...Ooh. I wonder. If I managed to install the cam such that the flywheel was 360deg(1 rev) off... what would that do?

 

Wouldn't even come close to starting. But if one tooth advanced the valves would act way to early, this would make for very low power that is a little better at higher PRMs and a lot of fire being pushed out the exhaust pushing the turbo but not the pistons. Sound about right?

 

I did NOT install my torque cam off a tooth.



Possibly installed gear off ?

 

You guys are thinking too hard....

Im willing to bet you are still a tooth advanced on the IP.

If the cam was advanced a tooth, I think you would be into PTV clearance problems, but I cant verify that for sure. That being said, if your IP is 1 tooth too advanced, its going to run as equally crappy as one tooth retarded at idle, and be very rattley....

I think its time to pull the front assy off and verify where you are at. Definitely sounds like a fuel delivery issue to me, unless you got a bad cam... They happen once in a blue moon, Ive had two, and thank god they didn't catch any valves. The Typ4 cam and R&D stuff are both ground by Delta.

Pulling the front off and checking is going to fully be worth it in time and money spent. Schedule a weekend to get it done.

 

Exactly. The R&D cam is installed a gear tooth off because it actually changes things significantly, the Torque cam is installed Dot to Dot, because its events are ICL centric....

 

Could be, but if that were true it means my harmonic balancer must have slipped. I dynamic timed it, after all.
Also, I know I've hit it one tooth retarded(sound and timing light numbers) and it still didn't work right. It sounded, there, like one tooth retarded.
I can believe a couple of degrees off, but not an entire tooth at this point, and that's well within the 'works with decent power but clatters' or 'sounds like a gasser and smokes black' range.

The other problem with this is I was not getting black smoke. I've run one of my other engines one tooth retarded before, and it smoked black. One tooth advanced and it has this definite top-end clatter.

What if the cam were retarded a tooth?

What would I be looking for in a 'bad cam'?

That's what I'll be doing Friday/Saturday/Sunday.
btw, found a nice alignment pic: https://gallery.phalengard.com/var/a...g?m=1292307006


Also, I still wonder what would happen if I was 180deg off with my cam timing(one full crank rotation off)? Nothing(because it's symmetrical)? Something else odd?

 

Wouldn't blue smoke indicate oil in combustion? IDK how true this is for diesels compared to gas engines.

 

Yes, usually. The question is, how is it getting there? I know the rings are still there and intact -- and I'm not pouring oil into the intake or anything... Only thing I can think of is perhaps it's sucking a vacuum because the intake valve is closed when the piston is coming down on the intake stroke and it's pulling oil passed the rings.
Allternately, it may be a ringer and disappear after getting the engine hot for a few minutes... but I don't think so, because it was still smoking after I did just that -- I hooked my empty flatbed up to it and tried to pull it up a nearby hill.

 

So... Time to swap this engine out and scrap/rebuild it, I think.

I pulled the radiator, pulled the front cover. When I pulled the cover, I had to loosen the IP cover(and lift/wiggle things) to get it out, and when I looked at the gearing, the cam-to-crank positioning was fine. The IP gear was off 90deg.
I don't know if it was like that before, or I just nudged it while trying to get things apart.

Anyway, I got it back to static timing 0, and bolted down the IP cover with the front cover off. It started OK, but is still occasionally missing, and there's a definite gear noise somewhere -- but that's probably just the IP/cam/pump gears.
Also, piles of blowby coming out of the opening. To be expected I suppose.

Buut.... After shutting it off, I noticed that I've got blowby coming out of the water jacket(!).
I also noticed that I was not getting any real smoke now. Perhaps the problem is a pinprick hole in one of the cyl's sides somewhere, and it was sucking in water and blowing it out. That also might account for some of the other problems, and why it didn't do it earlier when the block was dry and I tested it.
The heads I know are good; they were magnafluxed when I had the valves done.

I'm thinking it's time to look at one of my other blocks(like the one that came out of this truck) and see if I've got a good engine there, or if I need new rings or what.

 

Dang...... Sorry to hear that you had a bad block.... It sounds like the P/O didn't take care of the engine at all considering the oil sludge you found and now the cavitation....

Better luck on your next block! Keep us updated.

Bill

 

Sleeve it! It's what I had done to mine.

 

Wait just a second or two...

1) How did you determine the pressurization in the water jacket is from a compression leak? It the coolant system completely reconnected and full with no leaks? Are there other signs of a coolant breach into the cylinder such as sweet antifreeze smell in the exhaust, milky oil, or oily coolant?

2) Assuming that there is in fact compression in the water jacket, we could be looking at head gaskets, cracked heads, cavitation or a cracked block. I know your heads were checked and rebuilt and the gaskets are new, but that does not eliminste the possibility. In my opinion the chances that the wrecked donor truck was driving around with a cavitated engine are pretty small. You may be right about it, I'm just saying don't jump to conclusions. Do some more checking before you yank the engine and trash it. Can you do an compression and leak down test? How about a cooling system pressure test?

 

Alright guys, things have changed again. Looks like I was a bit hasty; I hadn't taken the heads off.

Now, what I did know is that I was getting smoke/blow-by into the coolant passages -- I'm watching smoke come out of the (partially drained) upper coolant passages in the block when I was running it with the water pump off.
No matter what, that's not good.


So, I pulled the engine again. Got it out, started to dig into it.
I checked the cam/crank timing -- all perfectly fine:

Number 1 is at TDC too:


So I pull the heads, and find this:

And matching marks on the head:

So, there's my clattering problem, and probably my leaks as well -- looks like the head wasn't seating completely(and may have been being pushed up a bit), and the valves were touching the pistons!
(Note: the coolant in this truck is mixed orange+purple+green, which is why it looks horribly weird...but it has the right SCA levels so...)
The question is: Why!?!?!?
The valves were new; I had them professionally ground at a shop. I checked one head, and found that 6 were at the low end of the tolerance(The other two were too tall, but they didn't have any worse marks than the other 6 -- not sure what's up with those) which meant they had been ground to meet spec.

The cam was reground by Typ4, and it seems to be in properly -- The timing marks lined up, and I make sure that the key /was/ in the camshaft and it hadn't sheared or anything.
Here's what it said on the end of the cam:


Now, according to Typ4:
I checked the rear 4 cyls of the engine with a pair of good quality calipers(readings could be off by .002 worst-case)
Cyl | Min | Max | Lift(Difference)
8 EXH | 1.496 | 1.770 | 0.274
8 INT | 1.475 | 1.747 | 0.269
7 EXH | 1.492 | 1.766 | 0.274
7 INT | 1.478 | 1.750 | 0.272
6 EXH | 1.496 | 1.768 | 0.272
6 INT | 1.476 | 1.750 | 0.274
5 EXH | 1.503 | 1.776 | 0.273
5 INT | 1.484 | 1.758 | 0.274
Not sure why my lift is 0.274 on everything while the spec is supposed to be .253/.261?
Is this a problem?
I'm not sure how to check that the lobe timing is right, either.

----

None of the pushrods were bent(even now, they are still straight), and the rockers were all on the engine previously.

----

The lifters could have had something to do with it -- All of them were used, I took the best from this engine and another 7.3. I just put them in(with lots of oil); I didn't clean and drain each.
(Note: I've pulled them apart earlier today, and am soaking them right now)


Now what? I'm pretty sure that the block is /not/ at fault at this point; the walls are perfectly smooth. No pinholes, no obvious discoloration or anything.


Oh, and here's another puzzler for you:
This engine is supposed to be a 93. It has 93 stamped on various parts of it; on the intake etc.
The block, however, is marked with: 1809000C3, which is supposed to be the turbo block casting?

However, the oil port at the back of the engine is still 1/8 NPT, not 1/4...