G'day!
My TD42 was fully rebuilt some 5 years ago. I drove it for about 1500 km, no issues, sounded nice. I have stopped the car for 2~3 years for body work, during which I would heat cycle the engine maybe once a month. After that, the engine spent maybe 1 year without being cranked. Fast forward to Sept/2023 when I reassembled the radiator, did a full coolant flush and restarted to have the engine working regularly again, I noticed a knock on the last cylinders area. Engine internals are brand new, so piston or bearing should not be. I have opened the valve cover to check for valve adjustments to see if anything could have an excess play that could be responsible for the hammering noise I was hearing. Actually some of the valves were a bit tight, not loose. I have adjusted them all to spec but the hammering noise persisted.
I have asked some advice to the guy from the engine shop who rebuilt it, and he mentioned that he had seen engines that stay unused for a long time, since diesel collects water, to develop some corrosion on injectors. He advised me to take it to an injection pump/injectors specialist. I will eventually have the injector pump serviced when I install the turbo kit, but my plan is to put some 5000 km on it NA to get pretty familiar and used to its behaviour and then turbo it to feel the difference, so I am not really keen to doing it before that...
For illustration, the hammering noise is similar to the one on this video. This is a very boring video and I don't recommend watching, but the hammering noise is at 0:35 for a couple of seconds only. He replaced the injectors for brand new ones and it resolved the problem.
So, question is, do people know of any engine-running cleaning method that is worth trying? A few liters of kerosene on the diesel tank or something on those lines? Or if I take the injector of the head, is there any cleaning that can be done without disassembling it that you know to be effective, at least in some cases?
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