The beast lives again.

Greazzer was kind enough to re-clean my injectors. Not only did he clean and rebuild my injectors, he did it TWICE, and the second time he re-balanced them even tighter than his usual very tight balance that already is half the tolerance of factory spec. This kind of customer service is amazing, and any business we can give him is not enough.

On Greazzer's suggestion and diagnoses, based on the crud he found in my injectors, I ran a clean paper towel around the intake for the lift pump - clean fuel. Ran a clean paper towel around the output - dirty! Rebuilt the lift pump(including the 5mm O-ring), then ran two cans of Liqui Moly diesel purge through the system via the plastic-bottle-as-fuel-tank method. The return line to the bottle stayed clear, not bad at all. I think I cleaned most of the goop out manually.

I took advantage of the idle time while the truck was sitting without injectors and dumped a couple tablespoons of ATF into the cylinders, and rotated the engine around by hand a few times to distribute it. If any rings were sticking because of carbon, I was hoping to free them up.

End result of all of this, the engine runs amazingly better. For the first time EVER, the gray smoke at idle is gone. I used to have a very harsh raw diesel stink to the exhaust - also gone. Incredibly smooth, better low end power, did I mention SMOOTH? It didn't miss after startup despite having not run for weeks and being started with rebuilt injectors and freshly bled fuel lines. No part throttle miss, no rattling on the test drive from air leaks.

My idle did bump up a wee bit during the diesel purge. Verified that the throttle lever and linkages and such were letting the throttle move back to idle stop, and it is. Maybe this is where it's supposed to be at and it's been idling low all this time, due to crud stuck somewhere? I need a tach.

Thank you again for all your help, and for putting up with my newbie questions and frustration.

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617 swapped Toyota Pickup, 22-24 MPG, 50k miles on swap