Visited Doktor A yesterday. Had an injector seal leak, the earliest states of Black Death. Was getting diesel exhaust smell in the cab for the past week. Pulled the cover and saw the telltale sigh, a thin amber shellac coating over the #1 injector. It turns out Black Death was well on its way, just not yet to the mid or late stages where the black, diamond hard ooze was filling up the top of the head. I caught it early, but despite pulling the cover two months ago and seeing pristine injectors, the seal had been leaking likely for "tens of thousands" of miles, and the Black Death ooze was beginning to fill the areas immediately surrounding the injector and the hold-down bolt. It certainly wasn't to the point where, like one guy, had overgrown and encrusted his oil filler cap to the point where that would no longer come off.
The Black Death was well entrenched down in the injector chamber and down in the hold-down bolt's chamber. The bold finally yielded after some tapping and twisting and some more tapping, and was removed while trailing globs of thick goo. The injector was not so yielding, and was effectively seized due to the goo and actual corrosion (like rust, which happens in about 10% of these cases, where moisture somehow had gotten down in the injector chamber. Not from fuel, but from some other method. And the cover is sealed, so at this point no one knows how it happens. Fortunately, it is indeed a rare thing.). So the injector had to be disassembled in order to remove it, which means the injector could not be saved and reused.
Once the injector and the seal was removed, all that Black Death down in the chamber must be removed in order to get a good seal with the new injector. Dealers and most other mechanics do not have the training nor the tooling to perform this task, which is why the standard procedure is to replace the head, which runs thousands of dollars. It's a tedious and delicate process involving specially made tools that resurface the smooth and threaded portions of the injector and hold-down bolt chambers. Then the chipped away Black Death particles must be removed from down inside the chamber.
Once all that it finished, it's time for the new injector and hold-down, and then reprogramming the new injector into the computer.
This stuff is as close to surgery as you're going to get on a vehicle, and it's why your dealer is likely ill-equipped to handle it. If they are equipped and trained to handle it, they are probably using the Injector Seat Resurfacing Kit that Doktor A invented, and it's the same one that Europarts has for rental. A dealer can do it, or even DIY, but I'd sure want to watch Doktor A do one first before I tried to tackle it myself.
He's fitting me in while working on, ironically, a Sprinter ambulance. I have a glow plug that's failed and needs to be replaced. We identified the culprit yesterday (#2, despite the DAD and the DRBIII tool saying #1), and will replace the glow plug and the module this morning. More on that after it happens.
