if by oil in the inlet pipe you mean the pipe between the air filter and the turbo yeah it has always been kind of oily for years and was on my previous 300sd to. I thought it just does that from the valve cover vapor capture thing in there.

So, turbo related leaking is a strong contender.
I would feel a lot more comfortable fiddling with that if I can get to a point where I can call this timing part handled and put the valve cover back on.
Any of you heavy hitters have any ideas about my screwball timing readings?

I've got plenty of time to work on it this weekend but there is a holiday in the states here on Monday so Tuesday would be the soonest any parts ordered Friday would be here. Thinking of ordering at least the injector heat shield washer things so I can do a compression test and at least soak the injectors in something. I did get a slight improvement when I did diesel purge a few months back.

Nailing noise I had this winter is gone though but the smoke has gotten progressively worse over time.
Starts quite easy though even in cold weather down to sub 30f which seems to suggest compression is at least reasonable.

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84 300SD 274K
38K miles on flatplate heat exchanger and various diesel/veg blends. prior to that 4K miles on unheated veggie blends with kero and DinoD.