Funny, similar just happened to me and I'm about to make a post for advice. I was in Hamilton coming from London, cruising down the highway and she suddenly started knocking. The knocking started fairly loud but deep at first then quickly became much quieter, cant really hear it outside of vehicle but sitting in drivers seet you can hear it. Drove back to London and by the time I got here the knocking was all but gone, next day I picked up oil and filter, pulled into garage and did drain and fill, sure enough fine metal particles in filter (at this point I wasn't even sure it was a bearing knock or say funky injector missfueling issue). Refilled and fired up and in the garage you can hear the knock but just barely. All this kinda tells me this motor is very rebuildable and I'm trying to decide which route to go.
I can pull the motor myself and bring it to rebuilders in toronto, there are companies there who rbuild ecodiesels, there's machine shops in london but seems nobody doing rebuilds so not sure I want to go through the trouble locally. Pulling the motor myself has the advantages of pulling intake and cleaning, replacing turbo coolant line and doing all the belt pullies and belt while it's out. The one stop goat shop seems to charge $2,000 for an engine swap which seems very fair and I have yet to contact him about rebuilding, he doesn't like emails and I can't hear very well over the phone
. It's a 2015 longhorn limited with 147,000km, air suspension etc, top of the line Leer topper and bed rug, completely gone over and newer cooper discoverer at3 tires, actually a nice truck. Too valuable to scrap but not valuable enough to justify a new motor. Another option is to see if I can list it for sale in the states, don't know if the american sites allow adverts from canada, with exchange rates as they are, high used truck values in states and americans paying far far less to rebuild this motor than we pay up here it may be a win win if I sell it down there.
I wouldn't pay much attention to any comments kind of saying your at fault for this failure. I had 3 mercedes sprinters all identical and driven identically, 1 had an EGR valve failure, thats it. 1 never ever had any problem at all ever. 1 I couldn't keep the thing on the road, never made 3,000km without a failure at 100,000km it was completely toast. Same oil, same fuel, same driving.