OK, I know all the diesel junkies out there are waiting for the daily update, so here it is.

We are most of the way through the disassembly phase of the in-frame. The liners and pistons are all out, and we have a good assesment of the condition of the engine.

As we originally suspected, the liners and rings are done -- fully dusted. The tattle-tales on the rings are completely gone, and the liners are polished nearly smooth inside.

The bearings are in really good shape, so there is no evidence of other problems, such as the dirt or wear metals in the oil doing damage elsewhere. We'll replace all the bearings as a matter of course.

So what we need for certain, at this point, are new cylinder kits (which include liners, rings, and pistons), rod and main bearings, the turbocharger rebuilt, the heads rebuilt, and possibly the blower rebuilt. Since we're this far into the tear-down anyway, I have also made the decision to put new injectors in, which will be entirely at my expense irrespective of where we come out with Infinity on the dirt ingestion issue. There's probably nothing at all wrong with the injectors, but they are 16 years old with 55,000 miles on them, and there will be zero additional labor to swap them now, versus another tear-down if one ever needs to be replaced later.

Since the heads are being rebuilt, Virgil asked me if I wanted to add Jakes for about another $2k, but I passed on this since we already have an output retarder on the tranny, making Jakes mostly redundant.

I am impressed with how quickly the mechnics here have torn down the engine. At this rate, we will be done mid-week sometime. Nevertheless, Odyssey will be here until next Saturday, since Louise will be flying to San Jose for a brief family visit on Tuesday, and she won't be back until then. So I'll be baching it for a few days.

Today we are struggling with keeping cool. We can't run the genny, since that would smoke out the technicians who are working under and behind the coach. I've got a power cord running to an outlet in the shop, but the voltage is very low, and our air conditioners are struggling with it, to the point that it gets even lower, eventually causing the inverter to disconnect from the mains. I've got one roof unit running, supplementing 12 amps of mains power with juice from the batteries. That seems to be working OK for now, but the unit is running at reduced capacity, and a single unit would be marginal in this weather even if it were running full tilt.