Greetings Forumites!
A disturbing new development with Marlene, my 83' 300TD, has me here looking for answers.

Literally overnight (this started manifesting itsself Monday morning), she has become hard to keep running at the first start in the morning and is now producing large amounts (heavy but not opaque clouds) of blue smoke until the temp needle starts to move. She fires right up but there is a pronounced 'miss' in the idle until 90 sec to 2 minutes of running. And, if you let your foot off the throttle she may or may not keep running.

After a little warm-up, everything's OK. There's no noticeable decrease in performance from before the start of the smoking / missing-out problem.

After warm-up, all her smoking is routine and customary, ie: some diesel haze on hard acceleration. And there is no evidence of blue or white smoke at any time. The warm idle is normal as are the warm starts.

Facts:
1) I bought her two months ago with approximately 220,000 miles
2) She now has about 224,000 miles
3) There has never been any visable blue smoke it start-up till now
4) She's had two oil changes (DELO 400 + filters) since her purchase in early February.
5) It's spring in Texas; nite temps are in the 50s. It was much colder (20-30s) when I bought her and the starts were significantly easier then.
6) I had an oil change done last Friday

Thoughts:
Is there a possible connection between the oil change and the cold missing-out/smoking??

Could this be a bad glow plug? Maybe more than one?

Any and all advice will be appreciated.



Regards to all,
Randy Leo

__________________
Never a dull moment at Berry Hill Farm.