Hello all

If anyone has any input as to my engine diagnosis I would appreciate the input.

Vehicle is a '82 300SD with 290k on a working odometer. I got it last August and have driven it about 2,500 mi since then. Last time I drove it was on a trip from Sacramento to San Francisco on December 30th. I cruised down most of the way at around 70 and the car seemed to run fine. As I got down to the East Bay(about 15 mi from S.F.) I ran into some traffic, and I slowed down to a stop. At this time the engine started shaking and smokeing pretty bad. It also seemed to have lost a lot of power and only eccelerated very slowly. I managed to coax it into to S.F. over the Bay Bidge in stop and go traffic smoking like crazy all of the way and could not get it to go more than 55 on the flat and 45 on any kind of a grade( those of you who know the East Bay are probably either cringing or laughing right about now). When I got there the the engine was shaking violently and black smoke was pouring out of the tail pipe. A mechanic friend of the family's came over and I was able to start it up but again it would barely run and was shaking and smoking very bad. There was quite a bit of blowby comming out of the breather hose between the camshaft cover and the air cleaner and tghe air cleaner had a lot of engine oil in it. I had it toed home(courtesy of AAA + menbership) and it has sat until now.

Today I finally got around to dioing a compression check on it and this is what I found: Cold and dry #1 350 psi., # 2 350 psi., #3 40 psi., # 4 380 psi., #5 325 psi., I rechecked every thing after putting a couple cc's of MMO down the injector ports and got the following: #1 360 psi., #2 385 psi., #3 60 psi., #4 395 psi., # 5 350 psi..

From what I have read the compression in every cylinder except # 3 looks pretty good. The spread from # 4 to #5 is kind of wide, but #3 obviously has a valve issue. Can anyone give me some insight into what is going on and the best way to procede from here. Is it worth my time to do a valve adjustment(have not done one on the car at all yet). Could a cylinder get as bad a #3 with out the valve being completely burnt. The engine always started O.K. but had a little trouble below 45 degrees F. At idle the engine would sometimes shake a bit but usually ran pretty smooth at speed.

By the way when I took out the injectors to do the C test, there was no errosion around the pintle and there was not a lot of lumpy carbon build up but there was a fair amount of soot


Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

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Sedecrem

82 300SD 290k(needs engine swap)
79 240D 354k with new heart transplant w/220k
82 240D w/auto tranny soon to be manual 4 speed