17 November 2025

Details about the New Engine

If you have any questions on certain reviews on products before purchasing, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Also, feel free to skip over the backstory to just read the listed details of the new parts!

Table Of Contents

Details about the New Engine

Backstory

Picture it.. Sicily, 1922… Actually, maybe it was Denver, April of 2024?.. Golden Girls reference aside, we were finally taking our first big trip out west after completing the monumental task of building our truck camper. The whole project was well over 2 years in the making with many projects still lingering even after we moved ourselves in early January, 2022. While we’d taken several successful small excursions around the southeast in those years between, we finally were ready to put some miles on our little home and see some of what the west had to offer. Ready and prepared as we’d ever been, it was time to spread our wings and get to use the camper like we’d dreamed of.

Fueled up, we set out from our home base in Carrollton, Georgia. West bound and up, Birmingham would be the first major city we would pass through on our way. Unfortunately for us, this was where we first started to notice that something wasn’t quite right under the hood. Blue smoke in a diesel engine is never a good sign, neither is burning through half a gallon of oil in that short hundred-ish mile span. Deciding to find a diesel mechanic in the area to check us out, we landed at a nearby shop to hopefully get a good diagnosis and be on our way. Although no codes were alarmed, the mechanic thought that it could’ve been the IPR valve because it had spiked to over 80%. We collectively agreed that it should be okay to just run it, because until other problems arose, there wasn’t much we could do. Determined to keep on travelling, we decided that whatever may happen, would happen at home either way. So, onward we went.

After stopping many, many times along the way trying to solve the disappearing oil issue, mixed answers from the mechanics kept us pushing on into the west, until we reached Oklahoma. Many online forums and research on the matter led us to realize we may need to consider having a compression test done. A shop in Oklahoma City did the test for us where it showed that 4 cylinders were under 300 lbs. of compression, as well as extreme blowby. We’re talking choo-choo train level puffing. So what does that mean?.. Our cylinder walls were done. The unicorn low mile farm truck known to be a half-million mile engine had decided now would be the time to end things. Great. At this point we definitely wouldn’t be comfortable going too far, and especially not on the mountain passes and backroads that we’d planned for our trip. We could head home, or head to Denver where we’d located a highly rated mechanic to give us our options moving forward.

Well, we made it safely to Denver. After dropping our camper off in Larkspur, Co. and picking up a rental car, we took our truck to a shop where we would receive another diagnosis and our options a couple weeks later. We enjoyed the front range tourist activities as much as we could, but the time would come that we’d have to decide on dropping the money on a re-man engine now, or attempt huffing this unit back home to do the work ourselves. It would’ve been nice for this story to have a happy ending, however that just wasn’t going to happen for us. We choo-choo’ed our smokey tail all the way back home without needing a tow though, which certainly made us happy enough in the grand scheme of things. We could’ve kissed the Georgia dirt as we arrived back home in one piece.

Now it was time to start over. The truck is a part of our home, so we would strive to make it out of the unfortunate situation much better than we went into it. After weeks of indecision and hours of research, we decided to go with a Kill Devil Diesel engine, built on our original block. We took on the strip-down mechanical work ourselves, leaving the long block machining to the pros. With their outstanding reputation, we chose to drive our block all the way to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina so that they could begin the rebuild. After a few months of patiently waiting, the motor finally arrived along with a blueprint sheet and quality control reports. While it technically may be considered a “rebuild,” everything but the chunk of metal that is the long block is essentially brand new. We spent a weekend piecing everything back together, while contemplating the next move, which would be a 4R100 transmission upgrade.

Below you can see the spec list of the upgrades included. We chose these options to optimize our performance in towing the camper, as well as horsepower for the empty truck.