Well fellas, after driving truck around for a few days and returning timing marks back to ~9 btdc, engine is back to ticking on that same cylinder. Looks like the saga continues with this reman engine from hell.
I called up Mel a few days ago and had a long conversation with him. First off, wanted to say thanks again Mel for taking time out of your day to help me out. I told him the entire story & the previous problems i have had with engine. He asked lots of questions about when the engine ticks & what parts had been replaced, etc.
I also told him I thought the injectors were the culprit & bought stanadyne injectors that seemed to fix the ticking noise.......until I remembered engine was waaay retarded from a while back when I was trying to pinpoint problem. On a side note, I do have to admit that it does run much smoother with the stanadyne sticks. As soon as I lined scribe marks back up, it continued with the noise.
Unfortunately, Mel thinks that it may be a wrist pin/connecting rod tolerance problem. Maybe wrist pin bushing is going south or connecting rod is bad. He also mentioned that maybe this cylinder is having an oiling issue, & perhaps something is wrong with oil squirter. Who knows until I tear this thing apart. And to top it off, I pulled dipstick about a half hour ago & found tons of very small metal particles
. Almost looks like a shimmery black paint. I have never seen oil have that many metal particles in it before. I'm assuming this is not normal since I have changed oil/filter 3x in the first 500 miles that this engine has on it. Lots of $ and time has been dumped into this thing taking it apart about 5x now, and its a shame stuff like this has to happen but **** happens I guess.
I think I am going to run this engine in the meantime. Don't plan on running it easy either. If it blows, it blows and we can see what was the cause of failure. Anyways
.