I no longer remember if the "iron duke" was a new engine in the 70's,
an old design, or a "retread" of an old design. I know it is a pushrod
design with gear driven cam (why American designers use chains on their
V8s is beyond me....) and it is at least based on much older designs.
I'm fairly certain the head design was new at the time, though.
Whatever the origin, it was MUCH more reliable than the early Vega
engines (when GM finally did the engineering completely, the Vega
engine was quite robust -- but in typical GM fashion, they "cheaped" it
to death to save a couple bucks and didn't finish the design before
going into production).
The casting process is alive and well -- Rover uses it on an old GM
aluminum block V8 (the Buick one from 1960 or so) and Benz uses it in
all their engines these days, so there is nothing wrong with the
technology. GM just failed to do the design correctly.
GM in the 60s and 70s was a strange mix of a company -- in the early
days all the divisions were completely separate, buying body designs
from Fisher. Not all of them were based on the same chassis, either
(notably Cadillac). During the late 60's and into the 70's GM
"rationalized" their automotive divisions, so that the differences
between divisions became strictly trim and fender related, the actual
chassis was identical. I remember a magazine article from the latter
half of the 70's were someone tested a Chevy top of the line against a
Cadillac and decided the price difference would make them buy the Chevy
-- trim was nearly identical, and you could, with some work, convert
the Chevy to a Caddy by changing the front and rear fenders over....
I suspect the separation was to prevent anti-trust action -- if the
cars were identical, GM would have been selling something like 55% of
the cars sold in the US, grounds for breaking the company up. The
Japanese corrected that problem by selling huge numbers of cars
starting in the mid 60's.
Peter
