I am a pretty good mechanic, and have worked on a great many of mercedes cars, and do a lot of marine diesel work as well.
I have a customer who asked me to look at his freshly installed twin mercedes 2.4L diesel marine engine installation. Everything was reportedly rebuild.
One motor runs great, easy start, no smoke, and good power.
The other engine, port side, runs exceptionally bad.
Random missing, horrible idle, very bad smoke, below 2500RPM or so. The engine does make power however and does not smoke when run hard.
I checked cam timing, compression, valve clearance, fuel quality, and primary pump pressure. had all the injectors checked. all is good.
No blowby. checked pump timing, but cannot do drip test, due to a non automotive pump. I cannot remove the spring and ball assembly.
I did check pump installation, and found the marks on the pump to line up at 24BTC. The missing at idle is really bad and random, its not a miss that is related to one cylinder, it much looks like a gas engine that has excessively advanced ignition. I did try to retard injection timing, no difference, still runs bad, advancing has the same result.
I pulled the pump again, and will send it out for inspection, but as a curiosity, is it possible the advance mechanism in the engine might be broken? causing random, and rapid timing changes?
who might have some insight here?
The engine is mechanically competely identical to a 240D engine.

Henri.