Thank you for the kind regards gentlemen.
I've settled on removal of the trans and pulling the motor. It will be okay on some firewood rounds or lumber and a tire. I'll leave the cherry picker bolted to something to steady it and make sure it doesn't roll away. Looks like this is going to be quite the job, but i'd rather save my back from crawling sideways under the hood and under the truck. Swinging a screwdriver in there is hard enough, let alone shoehorning heads.
Waiting now, for the hadgasket and upper motor gaskets, they should be here in the next few days, until then, I will see if I have enough random junk laying around to make a homebrew compression tester, to satisfy curiosity, and have some reference on where to begin looking, though my gut feeling is that there will probably be fresh valve prints on one or another piston, or a gasket with a bridge to nowhere in it.
I probably could have saved these gaskets, if that's what it is, by retorqing them at some point, though kind of left whats well enough alone, until now didn't realize that stock were asbestos, that were recommend to be retorqued at least once at 30k, so they probably could have benefited from this, but now they're way beyond just tightening up, I would think, anyway got a new set coming on a big brown truck.
I've settled on removal of the trans and pulling the motor. It will be okay on some firewood rounds or lumber and a tire. I'll leave the cherry picker bolted to something to steady it and make sure it doesn't roll away. Looks like this is going to be quite the job, but i'd rather save my back from crawling sideways under the hood and under the truck. Swinging a screwdriver in there is hard enough, let alone shoehorning heads.
Waiting now, for the hadgasket and upper motor gaskets, they should be here in the next few days, until then, I will see if I have enough random junk laying around to make a homebrew compression tester, to satisfy curiosity, and have some reference on where to begin looking, though my gut feeling is that there will probably be fresh valve prints on one or another piston, or a gasket with a bridge to nowhere in it.
I probably could have saved these gaskets, if that's what it is, by retorqing them at some point, though kind of left whats well enough alone, until now didn't realize that stock were asbestos, that were recommend to be retorqued at least once at 30k, so they probably could have benefited from this, but now they're way beyond just tightening up, I would think, anyway got a new set coming on a big brown truck.