For those who didn't see the original story, see the following:

https://www.dieseltruckresource.com/...e-t297309.html

And now, the rest of the story.

I advised my son to take his truck to one of the major diesel shops here in Houston and certainly not to let the dealership touch it. He then described his problem to the major diesel shop and got a reasonable sounding preliminary estimate. So I left town for Thanksgiving thinking that he would have the diesel shop take care of it. Ha!

Instead he decided the he and a friend would do the work themselves and had it towed to his shop. They dropped and cleaned the tank and pickup filter, cleaned the lines and removed whatever had to be removed.

And then they removed the valve cover. The rocker arm bolts on #6 had backed themselves out! They re-tightened them and, having convinced themselves the #6 injector was bad, replaced it. Then zipped it back up, put in new fuel and a new filter, fired it up and drove it away.

I now believe the rocker arm bolts were the entire problem and that the filter did *not* fail altho it did have a slight hourglass shape. They replaced the #6 injector anyway and returned it as a core. I would have liked, just out of curiosity, to have had the injector tested ... I suspect it was still working. Oh well, my son is happy and says the truck runs better now than when it was new ... and with better mileage.

In summary, the truck was fixed for far less than the $5900 the dealer wanted for a mis-diagnosed problem. Would they have lowered the cost when they found the rocker arm bolts loose? Would they have even mentioned it? $1800 of the dealer's estimate was to replace the catalytic converter which "was damaged when the filter failed". Did I mention that the truck had no catalytic converter?

Peyton

ps: We will be installing a multistage fuel filter soon.

 

Thanks for the update. Glad he got it running for a fraction of the cost. Id go rub it in there nose....