Re: Bring back the pretty cars

Not at all. The current Chrysler 3.5L will easily run longer than a Chevy v6 (and without dumping coolant in the oil past a warped manifold like the Chevy does). Also, the current 3.3 and 3.8L pushrod v6 engines are incredibly durable, as is the OHC 4.7L v8. The 5.7 and 6.1 are too new for any real long-term numbers yet, but they're turning in very low initial failure rates (and no Chevy piston slap either). About the only dogs in the Chrysler garage for the past 60 years were the just-went-out-of-production 2.0/2.4L 4-banger (head gasket problems, interference engine), and the 2.7L v6 (oil cooking problems in the pre-2000 model year versions).

Buick had to limit power output in the early '50s "Fireballs" to prevent broken crankshafts. Thickening the crankshaft would've lowered RPMs. It was the best argument to switch to 322" V8s in '53 to stay competitive, as Olds began eating away at Buick sales after the '49 Rocket debuted. The Oakland/Pontiac 8, another holdover from the late '20s, not only had the harmonic vibration/torsional twist problem, but had a soft, sagging block as well. How that lasted until '54 and still sold is a mystery to me. It even made a Chevy 6 look good. The only saving grace Pontiac Division had back then was that they used HydraMatic instead of Chevy's miserable PowerSlide. Pete Estes would change that with the 287 in '55, setting the stage for De Lorean's GTO in '64.

The Chevy 60° V6 (2.8, 3.1) was one tough little engine, although none too clean nor efficient in carbureted form. I've seen many 2.8s go

250K miles without major service. The 90° V6, a rehash of the odd-firing Buicks of 1961, has long had crankshaft problems since they tried that "offset journal" trick in the early '80s, but they hold onto it nonetheless. Many parts on today's 3800 and variants are directly interchangeable with what you'd find on a 1961 Buick Special or Olds F85. The English also got a lot of miles out of the Buick 215 aluminum V8, sold to Land Rover in the mid-'60s. GM management dumped it after refusing to invest money into improving their aluminum casting processes, a decision that would bite GM in the ass once again once the Japanese started invading the market.

People bought and liked the "Blue Flame" for only one reason...cheapness. Cheap to buy, cheap to fix...which they had to do a lot. Stories used to abound about hayseeds using a strip of belt leather to replace a worn out bearing shells, and so on...a true "goober's engine," just like the Cole V8 that came in '55, another piece of crap GM held onto far too long.

Smart pickup buyers from 1946 onward that wanted a GM vehicle were wise to buy a GMC instead...FAR better engines, and very long lived. GM management basically destroyed the independent GMC light truck line in 1963, mandating that more Chevy components be used. By '68, the massive GMC V6 truck engine was also gone gone from pickups, and gone from medium duty lines in '73. GM brass felt it was too expensive to produce. A 305D or E V6 had more AMA torque than a Chevy 327, a fact that most buyers overlooked....to GM's glee. A GMC dealer told me back then that GM could knock out three Chevy V8s for the cost of one GMC V6. Thus the change, and an indictment of Chevrolet engines.

Prior to '63, about the only thing that was the same between GMCs and Chevies were the body panels and basic frame rails. 1963 was the year that GM started becoming bold around cheapening their product, and they went headlong into that with their "less car for more money" campaign starting in 1971. By the time Chrysler got their styling act together circa 1964 after reining in the excesses of Virgil Exner, Chrysler was producing far better cars than GM across the entire line. So was Ford, for that matter. By '64, people were buying GM cars mostly based on blind brand loyalty rather than quality of product.

The 4.3 is the sawn off V6. The little V6, the 2.8 and 3.1, were quite long lived. The 4.3 had the same problems of the small block V8. However, by the time the 4.3 debuted, GM had finally invested money in fixing the notorious bad cam oiling and toughness problems, as well as some of the problems caused by a too light block casting. It only took GM 30 years to get the bugs out of the small block Chevy.

Not true. The As and LAs were vastly superior in longevity to any Chevrolet engine, excepting maybe the 2.8/3.1 60° V6. Even Ford's FEs could outlast any Chevy engine 3 to 1. As a machinest told me a few years back, "Guys come in with their tired 352s, 360s and 390s in their trucks after a quarter million miles or more. Guys come in with their blown up Chevy small blocks usually before 100K. You do the math."

Horse shit. Cole's main dictum in designing the 265 was that it be CHEAP. In doing so, he eschewed most of the features that led to the longevity and efficiency of Bennett's Olds Rocket and he and Barr's Cadillac of 1949. Back in the '50s and '60s, if someone got 75K miles out of a small block Chevy without replacing a camshaft and lifters or throwing a rod, they were doing quite well.

You mean a "wiener," I'm sure.

Really. Why aren't you still driving them? I had a 3800. It was a complete piece of shit...bad power, bad efficiency. When I noticed warm oil pressure starting to get lower at 95K miles, I dumped that Le Slobber and have never looked at any GM product since.

WRONG! The 300 was a Buick engine developed for the '64 Special when GM management decided to dump the 215 aluminum V8 on Rover. The 300 became the basis for all "modern" Buick V8s until GM dictated that Buick's only output would be V6s. Olds never used the 300, period. Olds used the "new Rocket" 330/400 from 1964 onward in the F85 intermediates, and from '65 on in the senior cars as a 330/425. As with all GM cars, displacement got "corporatized" in 1968, with the

330 going to 350 and the 425 going to 455. The 400 stayed a 400. It had NOTHING in common with the Buick 300. You need to get your story straight.

Finally, some truth.

You've got to be kidding.

The only truly good engine you've mentioned from GM is the Northstar.

That's just GM, not the best manufacturer to base a basic engine design decision on.

DeserTBoB wrote: The 90° V6, a rehash of the

Outright false. The 3800 has never had "crankshaft problems" at all. Nor have any of the other 90-degree v6s that have sold millions in the past

20 years, including but not limited to the Chevy 4.3, Mopar 3.9, Mopar OHC 3.7 (a shortened 4.7), and the Windsor v8 based Ford 3.8 (not the one used in FWD cars).

Normally, I'd agree. But the Buick 3800 is really world-class good. Very few (maybe not any) v6 engines have a better track record than the Buick

3800, and certainly few have ever reached the sheer output power that the 3800 delivered way back in the 80s in the GNX turbo. Those cars (and clones thereof built from Regals) are still hard to beat at the strip.

In complete contrast, the little Chevy v6s have all the typical small-block chevy v8 problems and more. Like the small-block v8, many of them will run like cockroaches to ridiculously high mileage, but a disproportionate number just flat explode. Connecting rods out the side of the block, that sort of thing. A really nifty and unique to the Chevy v6 failure is snapping the (hollow) camshaft in two when a cam bearing seizes due to contamination with DexCool leaked past the defective intake manifold seal. But even when one of them is running right, its a loud, rough, rumbly, raspy, obnoxious little paint-shaker.

One must never forget that GM has traditionally been run as much by inter-divisional politics as by engineering. Chevy has always been the sales leader, so when gut-check time came in the 70s and 80s and a furtive (and 20-year overdue) move was made to reduce the obscene redundancy in the GM engine lineup (3 unrelated 350 CID v8s, 3 455s a

454 and a 500, for example), the Chevy engine family was picked as the standard v8 (except for Cadillac which became Northstar). In every measurable engineering sense, the Buick and Olds v8s were better. Even the Pontiac v8 with all its quirks was fundamentally better. But numbers won the day, and Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick v8s went extinct.

Don't get me wrong- the Gen III version is *finally* a world-class engine. So is the Northstar. But how long did it take?!?! About 40 years too long, and we *still* have the crappy Chevy v6s being sold!

All Chrysler flathead engines would run forever. I have had three of them, the current one being the 241ci in my 1940 Royal Coupe.

Agreed. I've got a 215 flathead in my '49 Plymouth coupe. But it was overhauled once... in 1964! I have the receipts for that overhaul, which my grandfather had done. A whopping $160 and change. Its got close to 300,000 total miles.

The place where I work has a couple of Chrysler flatheads in some old cranes back in the assembly area, too. They just keep chugging along- been in regular use since the mid 50s.

My 1963 Chev II cost a whopping $2,200. That was 40% of my years salary.

SSR/HHR remind me of Studebaker pickups. Kind of neutral aesthetically IMO.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

All very true. My neighbor's "¾ of a 318" just passed 300K miles with no major work, and still running fine and passing smog tests.

I also think that the "oil cooking" problem in the 2.7L can mostly be laid to bad maintenance practices by the owner. I've yet to see one which the owner properly maintained have a severe sludging problem, although there can be tell-tale signs of goo up on top of the heads.

Ex-g/f's dad (an Olds line mechanic) had a '51 Plymouth for 40 years.

410K miles, replaced two water distributions sleeves, redid the generator three times and two water pumps...period. He loved Chrysler products, but would never work for a Chrysler dealership..."the cars are too reliable," he'd say. "No work!"

Hell if they didn't early on. It took GM about 5 or 6 years to figure out how to cast them without offset journals that would snap in the middle. Used to see them in the scrap piles in machine shops all the time circa 1981. After about '83-'84, they got a lot better, but the idea of an offset journal is dumb to begin with. Making them reliable was a case of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear on all of them. Of them all, though, Chrysler's was about the best behaved. Ford's is so-so...the 4.3 sucks, but not necessarily because of the crank. The whole engine, like its V8 ancestor, was a dog from Day 1.

Strange reverse idea: The 1960-72 GMC V6 (305/351/401/478) (and its

60° V8 cousins, rarely seen) had a 60° block BUT individual throws for each crank. Most machine shops catering to car gas engines couldn't turn a GMC crank; they had to be farmed out to diesel shops. Thus, this engine could've been any bank angle they wanted (and they indeed did, with the '63-'68 60° V8, only seen in the 5000 and up GMCs and equivalent Chevies. Another version seen mostly in Canada and Michigan: The 702 cu. in. V12, a fave of the Canadian logging industry, as well as in the Pacific Northwest.

The GMC Vs were known as "The Million Milers." I only got 458K out of mine before selling it. Just don't EVER exceed 3400 RPM, though.

Except that the factory recommended change interval was 7500 miles.

Studied a lot of 2.7's personally have you? How many have you diagnosed/torn down? (IOW I'm calling bullshit on your implication that you would have had much real opportunity or reason to study the internals of a significant quantity of 2.7's - failed or otherwise.

There have been cases of failure where the owner documented maintenance by the book and the claim for a bad engine were denied. Also some dealers refused to recognize the existence of Maintenance Schedule A conditions being possible - which, if DC accepts that as a legitimate conclusion to the claim request, means that even publishing it would be fraudulent. It would be one thing to cite in a particular case that the car was not used in Schedule A conditions, but these were out-of-hand dismissals without considering the possibility that it could have been because - in their words - there is no such thing as Schedule A conditions - the actual usage of the vehicle were not even looked at or considered.

It is clear that some engine designs are definitely more prone to sludging than others - to deny that is ignorant. In the bell curve of combinations of by-the-book maintenance and driving conditions, there will be definite failures whereas with other engine designs there wouldn't be. The important thing is that an owner recognize the prone-ness of that and take extra measures to push their engine closer to the bottom end of the curve - especially if driving conditions (short-trip, stop-and-go) warrant it.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')