Quote Originally Posted by DmaxMaverick View Post
This.
It may not be that bad. Maybe a gasket or valve/seat. Think positive, for what it's worth.
I suspect it might be a broken valve. Very similar symptoms to when I pulled this particular 506 engine out of the donor truck in the first place. If you recall, cylinder 1 had a busted exhaust valve and a piston that was banged up. I theorized that the engine had ingested a glow plug and caused the valve to break. Now I'm wondering if there are some hidden flaws in the valves themselves, or perhaps the valves got too hot and became brittle for some reason? Perhaps the original valve failed on its own without a foreign object. If so, I'm going to need to go through and replace all the valves to be sure. But that's just a theory at the moment; could be a broken piston as well. I'll have to pull the head to find out.

It may not be that bad, but it means a lot more work, again. I'm just really tired and don't feel like going through all this again. I still need to replace the torque converter (which just came in today... what timing), so I might as well pull the engine and see what's really going on and replace the torque converter while its out. I just don't want to do all of that again.

Casey