Lb7 Injector life

I know this thread has probably been brought up several times before but all I can find on the web is how bad the LB7 injectors are. This is the first post I have ever done on any forum, I have an 02 Duramax ZF6 manual Transmission that I have owned for about 5 years now,only diesel I have ever owned, I have had a couple 2500 Silverados with 6.0 and NV4500, I bought the diesel because it was the only manual Transmission 2500 that I could find at the time in decent shape. I am the 3rd owner of the 02 lb7, it has 225k miles now and still has original injectors to the best of my knowledge. It has no haze at idle and no fuel in oil, I check oil weekly. I asked the guy I bought it from, who had owned it since 47k miles and he said he had never had injector issues. I have a friend that works at a local chevy dealer, he ran a vin check and it doesn’t show any injectors replace by GM. The truck is completely stock and I add diesel additive every other fill up. Does anyone else have over 200k miles on stock injectors?

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Originally Posted by Ridge Runner

I know this thread has probably been brought up several times before but all I can find on the web is how bad the LB7 injectors are. This is the first post I have ever done on any forum, I have an 02 Duramax ZF6 manual Transmission that I have owned for about 5 years now,only diesel I have ever owned, I have had a couple 2500 Silverados with 6.0 and NV4500, I bought the diesel because it was the only manual Transmission 2500 that I could find at the time in decent shape. I am the 3rd owner of the 02 lb7, it has 225k miles now and still has original injectors to the best of my knowledge. It has no haze at idle and no fuel in oil, I check oil weekly. I asked the guy I bought it from, who had owned it since 47k miles and he said he had never had injector issues. I have a friend that works at a local chevy dealer, he ran a vin check and it doesn’t show any injectors replace by GM. The truck is completely stock and I add diesel additive every other fill up. Does anyone else have over 200k miles on stock injectors?

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The LB7 has had more than it's fair share of injector issues over the years. Cutting to the chase if and when you have issues we have the solution.

That said the story reads like Goldilocks and the 3 bears. The following scenarios all assume no incidents with lousy fuel contamination taking out one or more injector or reused supply lines causing debris in the edge filters.

01/02 too hard. They tended to crack and fill the crankcase with diesel. It's not super common, but some of these survivors seem to make it about 200k before the idle smoke issue finally gets them.

03/04 too soft. They tended to have ball seat erosion that led to no starts be it hot, cold, or both. Few of these made it long term as well.


Later production saw the bodies as "just right" and they tended to do quite well provided there was no major fuel contamination. Somewhere along the way the nozzle quality changed and we started to see the idle smoke/hazing start in just 30-40k which is ridiculous.

Yeah, that was my experience with the '01 LB7 I owned. ~180K miles on the OEM sprays before the tell tale smoking at the pipe. Couldn't find "new" injectors- only rebuilt Bosch, which lasted 60-80K miles. $4k each time at the dealership until I did the last swap myself- with new feed pipes. Dual filtration and consistent use of FPPF additives helps a little, but.....