The Olds 350 was a gasoline engine re-designed to be a diesel. This
is common knowledge, I think. GM didn't make a V8 diesel at the
time, at least Olds didn't, and it was NOT a new design, so there are
not too many options for the source. If i was, in fact, a diesel from
the ground up, it was by any measure one of the worst diesel designs
every perpetrated on the public.
In stationary use with proper fuel filters it wasn't a bad engine,
although it was fairly low compression and hence fuel hungry, but GM
was sloppy with manufacture and used a dud of a distributor IP in
it. Quite a slug to drive, and VERY smoky. Think dragging a mid
sized 80's GM body with a NA '75 MB 300D engine with 2.78 gears.
Totally inadequate main bearings (quite common to spin the rear main
at 25,000 miles or so, repeatedly), crappy head gasket, not enough
head bolts (from the gasoline engine heritage) and no water filter
resulted in most of them being in the junkyard pretty fast. If you
got a good one, and you could keep enough battery power in it to
actually start it (the glow plug system stunk, too), they weren't
bad, and if it didn't blow head gaskets, crack, bugger the IP, or
spin bearings driving on the highway, no worse than any other
midsized GM car of the era. Having owned one of those, that's no
saying much. I think I permanently damaged my knee from ramming it
into the headlight switch, which for reasons I don't want to know
stuck out from the dash beyond the door opening right a knee level.
I know several people who had them, and they were nearly impossible
to keep running for any length of time.
Expensive to fix, too.
Peter
On Nov 26, 2011, at 1:41 PM, Dieselhead wrote:
Call it what you want. Compared to even an old OM621 or an OM636,
or a JD, IH, Cummins, Detroit, Cat, Perkins, or even a petter, it
is a crappy engine.
That is purportedly just a rumor. Theres no doubt GM cheaped out
on head bolts and the 350 diesel apparently makes a great base to
build a gasser engine on but its not a dieselized gasser.
-Curt
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