A little bit of background: 70k miles ago one cylinder had a cracked ring that caused a very light scratch on the cylinder wall. The shop did a light honing and installed regular rings. Oil consumption was acceptable. This summer we replaced all 6 injectors with Bosch remans and installed a new turbo. Truck has 260k miles on it. Oil consumption has increased significantly. On a recent 1500 mile trip towing the RV it used over a gallon of oil and I have oily, sooty residue on the RV. So there’s a significant amount of blow-by. Also, on cool mornings it spins over nicely but takes 2-3 tries to get started. If I plug in the engine heater it starts immediately.

A rebuild is out of the question ($). I’ve replaced the oil loss with Lucas On Stabilizer for the time being to see if that reduces the oil consumption and improves the compression issue.

I have two questions. Will I benefit from also adding Engine Restore on top of the Lucas product (if the oil level drops)? And is it possible to hone out the cylinder and install a sleeve without removing the motor? I’m pretty sure it’s the #3 cylinder that’s the issue. Thanks.

 

There are many threads here about plugging in the engine heater resulting in easier starting. IIRC, all were resolved with replacing the sticks. Since your's are new remans, I would suspect they were not installed correctly (torque sensitive) or were the wrong sticks.

As far as honing and sleeving a cylinder without pulling the motor, I highly doubt it. The oil pan needs to be pulled to get at the crank shaft and pulling the piston out. I'm not an expert and never got this deep in a Cummins, so someone with more knowledge than me should come along and let you know.

It may also help if you identified the year of the truck.
Back to morning brew . . .

 

Sorry, it’s been quite awhile since I last posted and I thought my truck info was automatically included at the bottom of my post. No matter, it’s not there now.

The truck is a 2004.5. I should have also stated that when the cylinder was honed out 70k ago we also replaced the rod bearings. They weren’t really bad but since we were in it that deeply we figured it was a prudent thing to do. I’ve got a Smarty Jr. on it and running the +70 hp program. It has a 5” turbo back exhaust with a PacBrake exhaust brake.

 

Did you figure out why the #3 ring cracked? Wondering if the same conditions that cracked the ring still existed after the fix and broke it again. Ie injector dumping fuel.

I cant think of a reason otherwise that a cylinder would just start burning oil after a fix like that

Usually when you hone and fix a cylinder then what you get on startup is what you get for a long time. Ie why the change?

anyway I guess you could pull the injectors and scope the cylinders and/or compression test it to see what’s up. No oil will fix a ring if that’s what it is.

Cant think of how new injectors would cause a loss of oil. Gotta be structural somehow I’d think

Chay

 

With that much oil consumption, I suspect you have now other cylinders with worn/broken piston rings.

The 2004.5+ engines commonly crack piston rings with any kind of power adder.

1st up a compression test, which is time consuming on a diesel. This will tell you your next step.

Forget all the quick "goop in a can" fixes.

 

The shop performed a compression test when they installed the new injectors last spring. Only the one cylinder showed substandard compression but it was still acceptable. Of course it was during pretty warm weather so even though it had to turn over a couple times it still started easily. As it cooled down this fall it became more difficult to start. I didn’t drive it much during the summer and certainly didn’t tow anything. Thanks for the replies.