rlb245
Full Access Member
Well this hole thing started when the old girl started missing on a couple of cylinders on the right bank last winter. But seeing how I'm retired and on SSI the budget is not what it should be. The old girl has 875 thousand miles on the original engine. I want to rebuild the engine so I parked her until last month. I went on Ebay and found what I was told was a good running 6.9 and bought it. It just happened to be in my home town of Columbus Indiana, so rather than have it shipped to Buffalo NY, that's where I stay for 5 month of the year. I took a weekend and drove down with My Explorer and trailed it back to Buffalo. Excitedly I mounted the engine on my test stand, set it up. and spent 2 hrs on trying to start it. Well it never started. It tried! but wasn't getting fuel to the injectors. Pulled the injectors and found them all plugged with sludge. I figured I should take a good look at the injector pump to sense the injectors were so bad. Upon seeing the condition of the injectors and the injector pump I was doubtful that the engine had run in quite some time. I have spare parts for the my truck that I have collected over the years. I put my rebuilt injectors in and installed my backup injector pump. The engine fired up and ran but was missing on #3 cylinder. I done a compression check and found #3 cylinder was way lower compression than any of the others. Well in for a penny in for a pound. I tour it down and found that that #3 cylinder had a big gouge in the wall and evidence of rust. Pulled piston and found that a big chunk of it had broke off right next to the connecting rod and wrist pin on the inside. You would have had to pull the pan and bring #3 all the way to the bottom of it's stroke to see it or pull the piston like I did. Well I started a claim on Ebay and got a full refund. The seller told me to scrap the engine, He wasn't paying for it's return. The block is in great shape other wise. Cylinders are running .002 to .003 over. I'm going to sleeve #3 and rebuild this the engine with standard pistons. Cam, lifters and crank are in great shape as well. I'll mic them out today and put a new set of bearings in. Then pull the original engine out of the old girl and see what I got. Looks like I'm rebuilding 2 engines instead of one. Doing a dry fit sleeve on #3. Scored a Clevite sleeve PN 226-8138 on ebay! SWEET!!!! If you interested Ill keep ya posted on this adventure of mine. Just want to share my experience with an Ebay purchase that went bad, but had a some what happy ending!