About 6 year’s ago I bought my first Duramax a 2001 GMC 2500 from a lady whose husband unfortunately past away. He took good care of the truck. I had every receipt since it was new (anything that was done he kept the receipts in a folder). The truck had 112,000 miles and the bad part was I didn’t know enough about Duramax’s at the time and it had a bad head gasket. I don’t like taking anything to a shop so I do all my own work that I can so I ripped into it got the heads redone head studs in and it ran great for about two weeks until it blew a piston apart on the same cylinder the head gasket was leaking
.I did not see any cracks or any damage on the piston when I did the heads but something must’ve been wrong with it that I missed. Found a used engine out of a 2003 had it rebuilt Arp hardware everything and runs great. Had a smoking issue that I could not figure out and the machine shop blamed on injectors and fueling turns out they installed the valve stem seals wrong and rip them at the top of course they did nothing but offer me 10% off the next engine or parts I brought in to have work done
. They have all now since been changed and the motor is perfect with 60,000 miles as of now. One of the mistakes I made when doing the engine is I tweaked one of the torque converter standoffs that bolt to the fly wheel which resulted in clutch material from the torque converter coming apart, Luckily I caught it in time to not cause any major damage and have the transmission rebuilt with a trans go kit and upgraded crutches.
definitely a school of hard knocks but I enjoyed every minute of it I know every inch of my truck now.
.I did not see any cracks or any damage on the piston when I did the heads but something must’ve been wrong with it that I missed. Found a used engine out of a 2003 had it rebuilt Arp hardware everything and runs great. Had a smoking issue that I could not figure out and the machine shop blamed on injectors and fueling turns out they installed the valve stem seals wrong and rip them at the top of course they did nothing but offer me 10% off the next engine or parts I brought in to have work done. They have all now since been changed and the motor is perfect with 60,000 miles as of now. One of the mistakes I made when doing the engine is I tweaked one of the torque converter standoffs that bolt to the fly wheel which resulted in clutch material from the torque converter coming apart, Luckily I caught it in time to not cause any major damage and have the transmission rebuilt with a trans go kit and upgraded crutches. definitely a school of hard knocks but I enjoyed every minute of it I know every inch of my truck now.
