Back from the man cave:
- Timing is perfect at 0.9mm (1.10mm with cold start device connected)
- Glow plugs do glow
, but the engine does have a very hard time starting up when cold. Today's first start was no better than the very first one, unfortunately
- I tried running the engine and disconnecting fuel lines one at a time as suggested (thanks again @ngoma). Performance degraded when doing so at all injectors except
maybe with nr. 3. I say maybe because the engine runs rough already, so it was sometimes hard to tell what impact a single injector would have. But I'd say disconnecting nr. 3 resulted in a less noticeable difference than disconnecting the others.
- I then ran a compression test on all cylinders and I got consistently low results at around 380-400psi for all of them. This cannot be right and I believe (/hope) it might be because of a cheap tester + a tired battery that I had used to crank the engine the whole day. I will try again with a better set and with a charged battery, expecting to see at least 450psi. On the other hand, no cylinder falls out of the range, so for now I tend to think compression is not the issue.
I guess this leaves me with injectors or IP as the main suspects. I will test injectors tomorrow one by one. Not sure what I can try on the pump in order to diagnose potential issues.. any idea?
Two other things I noticed:
1. All injectors nozzles were dry except nr. 1, which was wet with what looks like oil. Not sure how worrying of a sign this is, if at all. Any opinion? Remember all of these are brand new with a mileage of zero, as is the rest of the engine. I'm attaching a couple of pics (one of the dry injector and one of the wet nr. 1 injector)
2. Touching the exhaust manifold after the engine ran for a while, I could notice a substantial difference in temperature between cylinder 1 and 2 (which were hot) and 3,4,5,6 (which were relatively colder, sometimes much colder).