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Well this is yet another horror story of using ether.
I was having a bad air intrusion issue in my 86 6.9L last week and I couldn’t keep my truck idling more than a few seconds. I unplugged the glow plug solenoid wire and my boss gave it a shot of ether while I cranked it and I made it a rough 10 mile drive home. The problem turned out to be a cracked fuel line and I replaced that along with the return lines.
However I realized my boss had reenabled the glow plug solenoid AFTER I warned him about using them with starting fluid and I was awfully pissed off about that but I decided to carry on and make sure my air intrusion issues were solved. after a long time cranking, the truck fired up extremely rough and was blowing blue smoke across the street. I shut it off and lo and behold, every glow plug was burnt out and one had the tip blown off with less than 500 miles on new motorcraft plugs.
What is likely the extent of damage I’m dealing with here? Cracked piston/damaged ring? This has been an expensive and time consuming project of mine restoring my first IDI and I’m honestly heartbroken.
Probably not an ether problem. Sounds like your gp controller is stuck in the 'on' position and cooked the glow plugs.
Replace the glow plugs, do a compression check.
If you're able to drive the truck the damage can't be catastrophic.
x2 on doing a compression test. Unless you're going to spend big bucks and get a SnapOn compression gauge MAW get one from Horrible Freight. Here's the one I have:
get a bore scope and check inside for damage, compression test if damage isnt bad
I was actually just mentioning this to a friend. Looking into the glow plug or injector hole of one of our IDIs with a borescope would just reveal the pre-chamber, correct? I'd imagine it would be next to impossible to feed a borescope into the cylinder through the pre-chamber. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Update: I did a compression test and that cylinder read 150 psi and the others looked normal. The injector and replacement glow plug were covered in a significant amount of oil, and the blowby blew the cap off the oil fill tube when I set it on top.
I pulled the head off and finally got a look at the piston…
I’ve only done minor mechanical work up until this point so I’m probably in over my head, so please pardon my ignorance
Since you've already disassembled the engine that far you MAW rotate it around until the piston is at BDC. This will let you see if the cylinder or just the top of the piston is damaged.
The sure way to tell would be to disassemble the short block and use a dial bore gauge to measure the cylinders to ensure they're concentric.
while that piston top is damaged, i have seen much worse and the engine still ran fine with good compression.
as said, there is either cylinder wall damage, or that piston has broken rings on it. .
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