For Sale - My dead CRD in Tampa, FL - Looking for a buyer!!

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 11:50 am

Well...got some bad news today. My beautiful Florida CRD with 116,000 miles is dead. It is quite simply not feasible for me to fix it. VM trained mechanic tells me the head is cracked, one cylinder is pitted, and it's possible a rod is bent. There's no chance I can repair it myself (two kids, one with special needs), and the labor and parts would virtually total out the truck. Merry Christmas to me...LOL.
I have lots of goodies on this truck (GDE tune, Weeks Kit, new starter, freshly rebuilt rear-end) and more that would come with it (hoses, tow hooks, new tires). If anyone is in the area, and could haul it off as a project, I am entertaining offers. If I can't get rid of it this way, perhaps I'll tow it home and start parting it out. If so, I'll have lots of goodies for sale. I'd prefer to just unload it, honestly. Took good care of it...never driven hard...mostly highway miles...not sure if it was a casting defect or what...major bummer. Well, I'm off to cry in my coffee... :cry:

APC9199 · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 12:16 pm

Did it drop a valve, or hydrolock? I can understand a cracked head, but a pitted cylinder and a bent rod is pretty serious unless something catastrophic happened. You would have known if either one of those things happened!

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 1:18 pm

Slow coolant leak over the last few years. Changed multiple hoses and fixed leaks. It persisted. Was checked for gases in coolant a little over a year ago...no gases. Truck ran great. Driving down highway the Check Engine came on with misfire cylinder 1 and low boost. Little low on power. Drove home, and from there it went downhill. I checked as much as I could and installed the weeks kit in case the EGR was failing and had been the coolant leak source. No good. Towed it to Detroit Diesel Allison (Kyle is the VM mechanic there). He checked multiple things and found no issues until today when preparing to do rockers. Said the head was shot and coolant was pouring into cylinder 1, I believe. He thinks maybe that is why it has started similar to an "air in fuel" issue the last couple of years. He is worried about the rod being damaged from the few times it has abruptly stopped cranking over the last few years (a couple with me, and one with him cranking it). Maybe those instances have been hydrolock. Unfortunately, they are not prepared/equipped to pull the engine and deal with a rod issue. It may be okay, but it will cost a lot of $$ to find out. Hope that provides a little more info.

Anyone who is interested please PM me, and I will get you my phone number so we can chat.

flash7210 · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:27 pm

Did he actually remove the head?
How else would he know if the cylinder was pitted?
Do you have a picture of the pitted cylinder?

I’ve dealt with a cracked head. Cylinders 2 and 3. But there was no damage to the rods or cylinder walls.
The only reason for pitting would be if the cylinders actually rusted. If you’ve been driving it daily I doubt you ever got any rust.

When my head was cracked, a small amount of coolant would leak into the cylinders overnight, causing hard starting in the morning, and huge plumes of white smoke out the exhaust.
I replaced the head in may ‘15 and the engine has been running great ever since.

Mountainman · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:58 pm

Exactly what flash said. There's likely a lost member that can get you back on the road with all the upgrades along the way for $3-$4k. And that's replaced head, gasket, ARP's, new timing set, egr delete, new rocker arms. Parts are less than $2k

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 4:26 pm

I will try to get a little more info from him. However, rust might be plausible, because I didn't drive the truck every day. I would drive it 400+ miles at a time, but there were periods when it would sit. And, there was likely coolant leaking into the cylinder and causing the hard start. Yes, mine too would start a little harder in the morning the last couple of years, with plenty of white smoke. If it ever sat more than 4-5 days, it would really be a pain, but I always managed to get it going okay. Always assumed it was air in the fuel, as the service manual said this could cause the smoke. It would be a bit of a gamble, but I wonder if I should just hope the rod is okay, and have him put a new head on with ARP studs. Are the rods pretty tough?? Any time I had an event that seemed like a possible hydrolock, the truck seemed fine afterwards. I actually thought maybe the ECM was shutting down the cranking because of lack of fuel...not necessarily hydrolocking. Would the Jeep be able to recover so well from these hydrolock events? I'm torn right now...this truck has run really well and I have a lot of money in it. I hate parting ways, but I'm just so swamped right now with other stuff...

Mountainman · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 6:34 pm

Occasionally the rockers cause a
dropped valve, and I've seen one where a little piece of a rocker clip managed to wipe a main bearing. It's possible that if a lot of water got shot into the chamber all of the sudden that it broke a rod, but you can usually feel that by rotating the engine by hand. You might need a cam or two also but they aren't that expensive. The rods are really tough and very rarely break. Did it knock loudly before it died?

APC9199 · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 6:44 pm

Once hydrolocked, the problem doesn't fix itself. The water has nowhere to go until it finds an open path out of the cylinder. Removing a glow plug or taking the head off would reveal the small area above one cylinder full of coolant. Once that happens, you wouldn't be able to start it and run it again. This is an unlikely situation unless you had a disastrous stall and no-start issue.

Mountainman · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:41 pm

Oh, and I've opened several of these with coolant inside and they were not pitted

flash7210 · **Posted:** Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:56 pm

Mountainman wrote:

Oh, and I've opened several of these with coolant inside and they were not pitted

The likelyhood of pitted cylinder walls is low.

First thing is to remove the cylinder head.
Then rotate the crank by hand and inspect all the cylinders.
Also bring each piston up to top dead center and compare piston heights.

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:55 pm

Well...it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to fix this myself...as much as I dread it. Oh man...what am I getting into?? Every other scenario I'm contemplating means taking a pretty big loss, and I'm just not ready to do that. I think I'm going to have to hope the bottom end is okay, and tear into the top of this engine with the possibility of replacing head, head-gasket, rockers, ARP studs, etc. Time to start looking at the technical section on here, I guess. Man...I've tinkered on this thing quite a bit, but never planned on becoming a diesel mechanic per se... Lord help me.... :dizzy:

flash7210 · **Posted:** Thu Dec 07, 2017 1:56 pm

You can do it.
Just takes time, patience, and some $$$.

I got a used low mileage head from VM Specialists in England.
Under $600 shipped.
Most of the other parts I got from IDparts.com

APC9199 · **Posted:** Thu Dec 07, 2017 2:56 pm

How critical is it to get it back on the road?

If you can spare the time, tear it apart before ordering anything. If you get to the cylinders and find out the engine is trash then you aren't out anything but time. If everything is OK, then you can start ordering things to put it back together. I'll second the vote for ordering from VM Specialist. I don't know where U.S. parts stores got their pricing for heads, but VMS was less than a third of the next best price including shipping from the UK! The only word of caution, they are used including the valves. You could probably request new valves at an additional cost but it may delay the shipping. Also, they do not seem to have the same valve problems in the UK that we do here, so I will be installing the one I ordered as-is with used valves. I'm not too worried about it.

Good luck and keep us updated! We would much rather see you get it up and going than scrap it out.

nsxtasy · **Joined:** Sat Aug 03, 2013 5:27 pm **Posts:** 2

APC9199 wrote:

How critical is it to get it back on the road?

If you can spare the time, tear it apart before ordering anything. If you get to the cylinders and find out the engine is trash then you aren't out anything but time. If everything is OK, then you can start ordering things to put it back together. I'll second the vote for ordering from VM Specialist. I don't know where U.S. parts stores got their pricing for heads, but VMS was less than a third of the next best price including shipping from the UK! The only word of caution, they are used including the valves. You could probably request new valves at an additional cost but it may delay the shipping. Also, they do not seem to have the same valve problems in the UK that we do here, so I will be installing the one I ordered as-is with used valves. I'm not too worried about it.

Good luck and keep us updated! We would much rather see you get it up and going than scrap it out.

Turn this adventure in a win by building a strong upper end which will allow for more power (you already have GDE tunes, right).

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Fri Dec 08, 2017 10:31 pm

Well...it looks like it's time to make lemonade...as the saying goes! I'm going to tear into this thing in my spare time, before ordering anything, and see what I can figure out. My mechanic had been concerned about how accurate of a measurement he could get regarding piston height (to assess the rod situation). Does anyone have ideas on how I can determine if the heights all match when I get in there. I would imagine any slight discrepancy would be pretty problematic, right? Well, I'm sure I'll have some more questions when I get started. Thanks to all for the words of encouragement...gonna keep my fingers crossed!

rankom · **Posted:** Fri Dec 08, 2017 11:00 pm

my advice , dont order anything yet , pull engine out disassembly , and report to us what you see , coolant in oil will damage crank bearings , connecting road can go to machine shop for inspection , if you have a spare car to drive in mean time that be good , that is what i do i just wiped out camshaft on my jetta PD BEW engine 400.000 kms , so i can drive jeep , so yes i got to call ID parts again , after Xmass lol , good look .

geordi · **Posted:** Sat Dec 09, 2017 12:02 am

MicroBruin wrote:

Well...it looks like it's time to make lemonade...as the saying goes! I'm going to tear into this thing in my spare time, before ordering anything, and see what I can figure out. My mechanic had been concerned about how accurate of a measurement he could get regarding piston height (to assess the rod situation). Does anyone have ideas on how I can determine if the heights all match when I get in there. I would imagine any slight discrepancy would be pretty problematic, right? Well, I'm sure I'll have some more questions when I get started. Thanks to all for the words of encouragement...gonna keep my fingers crossed!

I'm right across from you in Boca, and I've worked on over 70 of these now. If you want me to do the labor - no it won't be free, but will be VERY fast and you will have skilled eyes and hands giving you the honest scoop on what needs to be done. I'm also close enough that we could do it as a teardown-wait to order things-build it back over a period of time. Message me (email is preferred b/c I don't always get the notification of a new forum message here) from the buttons below and we can go from there.

MicroBruin · **Posted:** Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:18 pm

Geordi...thanks so much for the offer. I will definitely consider it. I just got the truck back today and it's in the garage. I'm a little nervous about coolant sitting in the cylinder, so I'm thinking I should get the head off as soon as I can to assess the situation. Well, to look at the bright side, the labor to remove the fan shroud, injectors, timing cover, etc. has been done for me...and I can put my new lower radiator hose on easily now...ha ha. Well, will continue to report as I make progress...

flash7210 · **Posted:** Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:40 pm

When removing the head bolts, use a good strong impact socket. Sorry, I cant remember the exact size.
Loosen them incrementally starting from the rear, then the front, working your way toward the center.
When I did mine I broke two sockets and stripped one of the bolt heads at the rear. Had to get an extractor socket set and that extractor socket is now permanently married to the bolt.
The bolts are very tight. You may also want to have a good long breaker bar.

For Sale - My dead CRD in Tampa, FL - Looking for a buyer!!

Who is online