You do need a gauge with a check valve to get a good reading and definitely don't want to use a long hose. It will take about 4 good compression strokes to get a stable reading. A diesel will fire down to about 250 psi depending on intake temp. The minimum I would want to see is 300 psi.
The injector spraying in a spider pattern says you're getting fuel and the pump is pressurizing it although you could have injector valves sticking open. Do the injectors drip a bunch after spraying or was it a sharp cut off of flow after the spray pattern?
Are you seeing about 200 rpm while cranking or much less.
Have you tried any starting fluid yet. That would tell you if you have a compression , cam timing or air supply problem.
I wouldn't mind a "road trip " to look at it but I had my Hawaii trip this year already.
I'll buy you another ticket, Mobiltech...
I should have known better than to use the hose, but hadn't really thought it through, and it seemed knee-jerk convenient so as to get myself near the starter-switch. Later I began to realize it's not only elasticity of the hose that's a problem, but it's like I added a bunch to the combustion-chamber volume, so it would really mess things up.
When I reconnected the gauge with minimal fittings, directly to the glow-plug ports, having soldered a Schrader-valve into the inlet of the cobbled-up tester, I got much more encouraging results. Something like 380/360/360/390 psi, cranking maybe more than four cycles, probably not more than 8 - I just cranked until it had apparently maxed out. I've kept chargers on the two batteries (24V) to make sure they stay up, and it sounds like it always did when trying to start; it doesn't sound like it's dragging as long as I keep the chargers going.
Injectors did NOT appear to do any post-spray dribbling. But now that you mention it, when should I start seeing diesel filling the return-branch daisy-chain? I put some of that transparent blue fuel hose in to replace the original 1993 stuff, and I noticed that no matter how much I cranked, I never got any diesel coming back through the returns from the injectors. Does that not happen at cranking speed, maybe?
I then installed the cleaned-up injectors etc, bled all lines through to the injector nuts, and hoped for the best. And nada - zip - not even the ghostly wafting exhaust I had seen previously.
I ended the day by hand-turning the engine to see if I could verify IP timing crudely - looking for a jet of fuel somewhere around #1TDC. I was checking TDC by using the glow-plugs as if 'corks,' loosely fitted into their ports, so as they hissed/popped up in the ignition sequence, I could anticipate when #1TDC was coming around again. Doing this, I passed TDC a number of times with no clear indication of any change in the 'lens' of diesel that was pooled in the top of the open injector port for #1. D'oh! I then realized that I'd wasted a lot of hand-cranking effort, since if the keyswitch is OFF, I should NOT get anything from that port. Sigh. I then cranked it a few times with the starter, again verifying that I saw a jet of fuel spurt up from the #1IP outlet, left the key on this time, and returned to manually rotating the engine. I finally got a little bubble coming up at about #1TDC - at least SOME indication of timing being correct - but never a distinct 'shot' of fuel. Should that happen at hand-cranking speed, too? (I figure if I need to do this method more precisely, I will have to make up some kind of barbed adapter to get me from the IP outlet to a small-diameter clear tubing, so I can better see the fuel moving through the tube).
**Starting fluid isn't a no-no, then? Ether? (If it matters, it's not a turbo). Can I do that with the manifold NOT connected to the air-cleaner, maybe with an old sock or something over the intake as a catastrophe-preventer, just for testing period?
Other than the starting-fluid, anything else to try? Cam timing would be OK based on my new compression-test results, right?
Mahalo - Dave