Thinking of 09...inspection was fine until...!!

[Torquemonster]

Newbie here. Been looking at 09 6.4's. Done a ton of research. So I find a really nice truck, but it has 189000km (117000miles). Many guys around here say the truck is just getting broken in, not to worry too much about the mileage. So I think OK, let's check it out.

Everything looks good. Guys seems like a straight shooter and says he has never had an issue with the truck. DPF is deleted, SCT livewire tuner and he runs the fuel mileage tune. EGR is still all in place. -20C (-4F) and it started right up without being plugged in. So it's idling for a while as I look over the truck. No signs of white foam on the degas bottle. No sign of coolant leaks. No low coolant level and I am assured it does not drop, that he has never had to top it up. A bit of oil all over the crank case vent line add the oil addition bottle. Guys says it's from spilling. I forgot to do the blow by test.

So maybe 15 to 20 minutes go by as I am looking it over and the motor starts to make this clacking sound. Clack, clack, clack, clack she goes. Then I notice whitish smoke coming from the exhaust. It's not heavy/thick, but it's there. Seller says this only happened once before when the first cold snap hit here back in September. His performance shop told him to remove the program, and put it back to stock, then reload the SCT program. This fixed the issue until this past weekend. CEL light came on at the same time. You can turn the truck off, restart and it's fine......unless you let it idle for a while. If you drive away before the clacking there are no driveability issues.

He called his local dealer to find out what it could be and they were quick to say EGR valve or hyper extended thermostat. What I need to know from the experts here is if the dealer is correct, or could this be something worse? I like the truck but can't afford to buy it and start puting mega bucks into engine work.

I would do an EGR delete right away but there is no guarantee it's the fix. Unfortunately we did not check the codes suing the SCT.

What do you guys say?

[drunk on diesel]

Here's what I say. Don't buy a messed up truck unless the price is low enough to fix whatever could POSSIBLY be wrong with it.

If the guy wants to sell the truck for market price, it needs to be a good running truck without issues IMO