D2 main engine question

Hi Uncle Rich,
sitting in the operators seat the timing window is a 2 bolt cover on the right hand front face of the flywheel housing at about half way at the sump pan and cyl block sealing faces.

Be carefull that someone has not installed the flywheel in the correct timed location as the flywheel retaining bolts are equidistant spaced. This means the flywheel can be fitted at the incorrect position thereby putting the timing marks out for the relevant cylinder. There are chisel marks on the crank flange and flywheel bolt head face to correctly align the component by---sometimes they can be hard to see if you are not aware of them.
Later designs of Cat engines have one bolt staggered to aleviate this problem.
Cheers,
Eddie B.

Thanks Eddie , that helps. There is a lot of crud down there, so maybe I,m just not seeing it. I,ll find it now. I,ll verify the flywheel by using the valve rock-over method described elsewhere. That trick works good on motorcycles and many other engines quite nicely.
The reason I want to find them is because I,m thinking of checking the injector lift heights. I have one cylinder that,s not right and I,m hoping it's not an intake or exhaust valve leaking. The engine has a hiss, hiss hiss, sound while running. I,ve only run it long enough to load it on a trailer and get it to my property, then removed the pony, pinion assy, govenor and injection pump. When I get my pony fixed I,ll get the diesel figured out. Everything looks good in my injection pump but wondering about the injector strokes. Does that need to be done very often?

Hi Uncle Rich,
my usual first action when something is not correct or working as intended is to do the simple things first.
As you are going thru the engine I would check the valve lash first, also see if you have a valve pocketed/sunken into its seat, this artificially makes the valve stem too long.
Check if the decompression cam and rocker arm decompression pad may be contacting and holding an inlet valve partially open.
The new setting for the decompression cam clearance is about 0.125" This is not adjustable as such but is correct when a head has been reconditioned with the seats cut, valves ground, and valve stem length set to factory specs.

Yep, the old valves rocking check works well to get in the ball park for valve timing.
At one time there were engines from the factory with misplaced TDC marks and we had to verify them.
One of my standard checks for low performing engines was to verify TDC first, then injection timing, then cam timing. Found some Re-man cams that were less than desireable.

I now play with old farm engines and valve timing marks are confused or non-existant so ----
Also played with English motor cycles, 3/4 speedway midget speedway cars and a 1200cc Indian Chief back in earlier days.

Lifter settings do not usually need to be done between engine rebuilds. If you are confident at doing the lifter settings then do so for your own gratification at maybe hearing an improvement in engine sweetness.

One day I would like to do an engine by the Spill Timing method that we were taught at trade school for the on bench settings for English diesel engine CAV/Bosch inline fuel pumps, BUT, I would splill time all cylinders on engine to the verified flywheel timing marks. I did this on my English 5 cylinder 5LW Gardner engine and it ran as sweet as.

I know of some old Cat engines that had been re-conditioned and ran no better afterwards until the Lifter Settings were done.

Enough rabbiting on.
Cheers,
Eddie B.