We have a petteroid 3.5 that we purchased recently, after cleaning the sand out of the crankcase, overhauling etc we tried to fire it up and couldn't be started without starting fluid. After lots of fiddling and expermentation we retarded the the whole camshaft a notch, which works out to about 6-7 degrees. Now it starts and runs nicely but smokes, not an awful lot, but enough that it's bothersome. We fiddled with the valve lash, it made a little difference, but not much. We thought it might be a lack of oxygen in the cylinder (e.g. intake timing?) but that doesn't seem to be the case. We even put a new camshaft in but that didn't help any either. Now just lately I was told by someone that the injector squirts fuel too close to the cylinder, or on the piston/cylinder walls, where it just sits and smoulders instead of burning like it should, therefore the smoke.
Are there more people with this problem? I heard it's just how they do, you can't fix it. It seems to me there has to be a way to make them burn cleaner, all that smoke and unburnt fuel going out the stack goes against my grain!
I also saw that fattywagonman modified a piston (on the 6/1?) to make it burn cleaner, did anyone else do this too? If so, what results did you get? IMHO it seems to me that might be worth looking at.
I was checking out fatty's EGR setup, very interesting, where are you with that by now, fatty?