Novak Adapters shit out:
materialize successfully past the idea stage. The lack of good, light-duty domestic diesel engines makes these swaps a discouragingly difficult process. Foreign diesels are usually quite advanced, but are difficult to find and maintain. If you do manage to install one of these, US diesel fuels are less refined and have a higher sulphur content than foreign purposed fuel, and generally incompatible with foreign designed and produced injectors.
may find that it requires more commitment and cash than novelty is worth. If you are seeking them for fuel economy or efficiency, you may consider a modern, clean burning fuel-injected gas engine.
Does it have to be spelled out in detail what a crock this all is?
Novak just wants to get you to buy a kit to put in a Chevy like every other monkey see monkey do idiot out there. That way they sell more product with no more work. Bottom line they are lazy. Or the family is controlled by a semi-violent eighty year old patriarch/capo who had a bad time in WWII and is sporting a stiff for the Japs or Krauts after all these decades and the kids kiss his ass. I don't know.
Think about the above. Cummins, Cat, and DDA decided in the forties and fifties to build big diesel engines and leave the sizable market for small diesels to importers, because being built primarily for automotive applications, Mercedes Benz, Nissan, Isuzu, and Mitsubishi could sell industrial derivatives of their AUTOMOTIVE diesels cheaper than DDA/Cummins/Cat could build them. They found widespread use in gensets, Thermo King and Carrier reefer units, small tractors, farm equipment, Vermeer trenchers, and-because there is a secret huge stash of perfectly good diesel fuel all over them,it's just marked "JP-5/Jet-A"-airport ramp equipment of every imaginable type. You have to be one blind magoo not to see them every day. This was actually a good business decision. It does mean all the small diesels are "foreign". If you are, as Novak appears to be, on a religious crusade against imported products, stop reading now.
If American diesel fuel was no good for all these foreign diesel engines, why have they been running fine on it for forty-five to fifty years? Why has no injection or pump shop ever heard of this?
Gas fuel injected engines will never equal the BSFC figures of diesels, because their compression ratios are still those of gasoline engines, and worse, they run at full effective compression only at wide open throttle. Gasoline engines throttle the air supply and regulate fuel to the air used. Diesel engines receive the full air charge at all speeds and power settings.This means a diesel has a much flatter fuel efficiency curve because diesel engines are efficient from just over idle power (not RPM) to just short of full rack whereas for a given gasoline engine-its compression ratio,fuel used, cam timing, and thermal limits on its pistons, cylinder head structure,valve heads, and spark plugs-peak efficiency is achieved at only one thermally limited power setting and the curve is asymetric, but down from there. Above that power setting fuel mixtures must be substantially under or over stochiometric or the engine will suffer heat failure. Usually over is chosen, which complicates emission control as well. Put bluntly, given reasonable gearing choices, you will always get better fuel mileage from a diesel. The less smooth you are as a driver-or the rougher the terrain or traffic-the bigger the delta. (And I drive like a jackrabbit to be honest.)