Still using the bus on a regular basis! Being that we are just coming out of winter it's been used for hauling more than for camping lately. This spring I decided to try out one of those injector shim kits sold on eBay by user "truckrental":
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from...m+kit&_sacat=0
I bought the $60 kit, which lacks some of the tools that I already had.
On a T444e in a dog nose bus the job was easy-peasy. Takes about a half hour to get both valve covers off, then maybe 10 minutes per injector if you're slow like me and want to double/triple check everything. Also noticed that the connector came off of 2 of the glow plugs, so I squeezed the female contacts with needle nose pliers to tighten the grip and re-connected them.
I haven't driven it enough since to know if there's much of a difference. Before shimming each injector I did check the clearance using the feeler gauge and there were probably 4 that were well outside of spec, so I expect to see some change in engine operation.
Now, I know that the shim kit is a band-aid fix. The proper way is to get injectors rebuilt and that shimming can ruin the injectors beyond re-use. And that's ok with me
I'm not planning on dumping money into this engine ever, really. If ever something costly goes wrong with this one I'll hunt around for a full-length dognose with a lower mileage T444e and do a swap. Though they may be getting harder to find, so I should probably scoop one up soon and put it in my "Resource Pile" (aka junk yard) soon!