[special-K]

It should idle up till warm. I'd look into that. There is a fuel heater that can fail. That's why it's smoking on cold starts. I haven't had my '92 since '14 so getting fuzzy on stuff. The glow plugs you bought can probably take the extra time, but what these trucks came with would burn up from that extra time. I think what you want or 9Gs? Make sure you have good firm clean connections at the plugs. I had bought a bypass manual controller someone was making when I had a lower compression high performance engine. All that did was cause problems. Turns out the glow plug system runs on 9 volts, I think it is, and that switch was putting 12v to the plugs burning them up. Other than that episode, the whole 334k I drove that truck it started great.

If you are losing your fuel prime/air getting in somewhere it will crank a lot to start, naturally. I had an issue with that on an '85 with 6.2. Same engine/different filter/separator. I chased and chased till I discovered the culprit was the base on the filter being cracked...with no replacement available. I could have adapted to the on engine filter from a 6.5 but ended up making up a spin-on fuel filter mount with bleeder using fittings