Time for a good ol' GMT400 serious wrenching post. I have not had one of these in a long time!!
My plan was going to start out with a compression test, however since I had such an issue with completing the power circuit the poor ol thing only had enough juice to barely crank and then start and then it would run (barely) so I didn't get very far with that.
So I proceeded to remove all of the spark plugs, and the spark plug from cylinder 2 actually had an anti-fouler which I have never seen used before until now (I knew they existed, just had never seen one in person) but the PO told me he did this and it actually helped a lot to keep it going a while longer.
You must be registered for see images attach
Next I spent a good portion of my afternoon just picking away at it stripping it down until I had the cylinder heads off, and along the way I had an exhaust manifold break and I have yet to look into it but I'm hoping it comes out easy, looks like the bolt has been broken for a long time then I finally broke it the rest of the way.
The intake manifold gasket didn't look like it had any bad spots but I knew I wanted to keep digging down because I felt that it was a valve stem seal.
Turns out, it was the intake valve stem seal and in the image above you can barely see it seeping out, and there was actually more oil there but I wiped some away with my finger to see really how much was there.
You must be registered for see images attach
You must be registered for see images attach
Now I'm not really sure if this engine has ever been rebuilt, I'm going to lean towards no and it's the original with 220,*** miles on it and had all the exhaust heat shields and the stupid things that hold the bolts together and you have to use a screw driver to fold a piece of metal over to get the socket over the exhaust manifold bolts. The cylinder walls don't look crazy great and it seems like everything has a fair amount of corrosion.
You must be registered for see images attach
You must be registered for see images attach
So my final determination is that the engine is coming out and I will rebuild it. Honestly if I knew it was going to look that bad in the cylinders I would have just pulled the entire engine out and then tore it down, that would have saved me so much time today rather than trying to pull the cylinder heads off inside the truck.
So now the next question is how crazy I want to go with the quick rebuild. I really would like to go with vortec heads but I can't justify spending the $500 on a proper intake manifold for something I won't be keeping for a while. So at this point I'm thinking just your regular rebuild kit and maybe a rv cam. The first engine I swapped in the army truck had one and I liked the way that truck ran. Always so hard for me to justify what I want to do lol