Re: The Last Really Good Chrysler Product

I guess that is why you are you and the rest of us are glad we aren't.

| >up oil at a 30%+ per year growth rate with supply channels already at full | >production. So, most of them will be left parked in the driveway along with | >the SUVs. Too expensive to drive and no one will want them (so no one will | >buy | >them off of you). They may be good...(yet to be seen), but part of being | >good | >is that it fits the times. I wouldn't touch one with a 10-foot pole...it has | >

| >"loosing your shirt" written all over it! | | I guess that is why you are you and the rest of us are glad we aren't.

See you in retirement. Oh, wait, old 300C owners from decades back will be retired and living in their car by then. (I know, that a little of a overstatement...maybe) ;-)

However, I lived and drove through both the 70's oil crisis (73 and

79)...waited in 2-3+ hour gas lines, etc. many times. It reinforced the lesson I already knew watching others. I even knew better back then (not being much older than a kid at the time)...people with gas guzzlers lost a LOT of money. They were basically stuck with BIG cars they could no longer afford to drive and couldn't sell because no one else wanted them either. It's coming again...the signs are there plain as day (no matter if Kerry or Bush are elected). The news just today, inventories of distillates (gasoline, fuel oil, diesel) are well below projected need for the winter with production capacity still below consumption rates (so inventories will get even worse!) But, hey, knock yourself out. The only part that actually makes me angry is that I may have to wait in gas lines just because people buy these unnecessary fuel wasting vehicles. But I am partly consoled to know that they will be in line with me.

"Ted Azito" wrote

I'm sure this isn't his choice but I'll tell you what mine is. My 1984 Horizon 5-speed. Ran like gangbusters for 10 years of road-warrior commuter duty through Ontario winters. Never needed to be towed. Used very little gas and cost chicken feed to maintain. Paid off my mortgage. Needed fewer repairs than the Camries and Accords that my friends were driving at the same time, and even at the end when the body was rusting out it could blow the doors off cars with engines twice the size.

Astonishing interior room to boot - helped several people move.

I don't get insulted when I hear people say that Omni/Horizons were bad cars. I just smile.

In the early 60's my Dad bought a 1956 Dodge from an old lady on the block for $100. It a a "Red Ram" engine, a really neat interior with push button automatic transmission, real vent windows on all for doors, a real oil pressure gauge, the most comfortable seats I've ever sat in with tons of room, and a pop up air vent that you moved a big chrome lever under the dash to activate. think it was white over green. A really fun car. A friend in high school was given a 68 Charger by his father. I drove in it once. The one thing that really stuck to me about that car was that it as "solid" stiff, body. no frills but it felt "strong"

We had a 68 Coronet with a 318. That 318 went like a bat out of hell. It was just the right hp / weight ratio. Shame it was stolen and few months later.

We had alot of Darts, 64, 70, 74 model years to name a few. The slant six engines and transmissions were solid but the bodies rotted away. but so did the Fords and GM products of the same time.

The Omnorizons were good cars for basic transport. My main beef with them vis-a-vis the VW Rabbit/Golf (early ones had Rabbit/Golf drivelines) was no diesel-unlike the VW, Ford Escort, and Shovette. I have heard it's possible, with a little fabrication, to swap a VW engine and trans in them and the little mini-pickup 024 with a VW TDi and five speed would be cool.

But they would run longer than the owners wanted them to usually.

The Slant 6, despite its three main bearing lower end, is a pleasant enough engine and it's a shame there never was a small enough, and rustproof enough, chassis for them to shine. With three sidedrafts and tube header exhaust they would be pretty swank. If memory serves they have a different bolt pattern than any Mopar V8 and to add to the misery unless they were sold with a manual there's no crank pilot hole, which is a pain in the ass to have drilled out because it has to be done on a lathe rather than a crank grinder.

The asymmmetrical XNR would make a great kit (hint,hint.)

As I remember, the Nissan SD33 was sold by Chrysler as a "Chrysler Nissan Diesel" (replete with a so-embossed chrome rocker box cover) and it had a standard Mopar bolt pattern. Was it that of a /6 or one of the V8's? These were sold as a Chrysler Industrial product and not put in cars but Tony Capana did a bunch of swaps. They suffered from lack of a 5 speed manual or a four speed Torqueflite but today that would be remediable. One of the old Valiants with the trunk lid reminiscent of a Westinghouse 45° washer would make a good host for one of these great engines,especially if someone could figure out how to get a pushbutton transmission controller to work with a four speed Torqueflite.

=2E..FOUR main bearings located well above the pan rail, each of which the same size as those found in Chrysler's big-block V8s, and all of which support a forged steel crankshaft (on engines built between '60 and mid-'76; engines after mid-'76 have a nodular iron crank, which isn't as sexy but is plenty strong enough for all non-race purposes). There's no "despite" about it -- it was and is considerably more than adequate.

For certain definitions of "swank", sure, I guess.

True.

False; it's there, just not fully finished out to accept a standard pilot bushing. There's a special pilot bushing that fits in such cranks.

Agree!

Doubtful but possible. The factory installed a few of these turds into Dodge D100 pickups in '78-'79.

Such a swap would be very much akin to entering a church, climbing atop the altar, dropping trou and taking a dump.

Lower the dosage, guy.

I stand corrected.

and all of which

I believe you are errant.

The Dodge _vans_ were briefly sold with Mits, not Nissan, engines. I don't know about the trucks. It would surprise me to learn they put Mitses in the vans and Nissans in the trucks-on second thought nothing Mopar did surprises me really. I will check this out.

The SD Nissans are very tough, durable engines with reasonable torque and are simple to work on, and weight is about the same as a /6. Why you think that makes them "turds" is a mystery. I have seen ones (actually SD22s which are the four cylinder variant-same cylinder kits, valves, pushrods, et al) that have rolled 55,000 hours in ground support equipment using only raw Jet A for fuel and Aeroshell for oil. They were getting tough to start in the cold and a little smoky but they were probably superb cores-no cracks. I'm very fond of these powerplants. Those that were cared for at all well are still powering IH Scouts.

They are not high horsepower and naturally aspirated ones will smoke a little sometimes. Power to weight isn't superb, but we weren't talking about flying one anyway. (If that were the criteria we'd all go Subaru, which has replaced tha aircooled VW and various Fords as the car engine most often seen hanging off firewalls at Oshkosh.) No one is flying any engine Mopar per se ever built, however the current production Mercedes diesel four is the core of the certificated Thielert TAE 125 aircraft engine package...

There was a plane built in 1936 with a plymouth flathead engine. This was a PRODUCTION plane.

I believe you meant "mistaken" or "incorrect", for "errant" makes no sense in this context. Whichever of the three you meant, I am not.

That's as may be, but the D100 was available with the Nissan diesel in '78-'79. I've got a contemporaneous Popular Mechanics with a road test of it, around here somewhere, and at one time was in regular contact with a former owner of such a truck.

According to the road test (and the abovementioned former owner), the trucks took about 35 minutes to go from 0 to 60, once you got them started, which took considerable patience. Exhaust smoke was heavy. Horsepower was something ridiculous for a D100 -- I'd have to re-read the road test, but it was something like 72BHP; totally inadequate.

Who the hell cares if you could get 22 mpg on the highway if you were doing it at 22 mph trying to lug a week's worth of groceries up a 1% grade?

DS

I'll also add: A company in California offered a Dart/Valiant/Duster conversion using this same Nissan diesel engine from '73 to '74. That vehicle, like the factory-equipped '78-'79 D100 pickups, was excessively noisy, bog slow, extremely smoky and bitchy to start from cold.

We're supposed to think you've got a great idea here because *why* again?

The turbo engines are a lot more suited to vehicle use than the naturally aspirated ones: they were idiots to use the NA version if that's what they did. And in any event, the /6 in full size pickups was an obstruction to traffic too, especially the three on the tree ones. The SD33 or any other 3.3 liter (200 cid) engine was a smaller engine than a fullsize truck should have if it is going to be used on the highway at all. (Keep in mind a lot of pickups and vans in the old days were sold to fleet buyers who never got out of town or up to highway speeds and if it was faster than a horse they were happy. People started buying pickups more for personal vehicles in the late

70s, but there was still a market segment totally unconcerned with speed.)

Every time the memory almost dies, someone has to go and resurrect that clunker. Installing that engine (and I use the term loosely...) was one of Chrysler's few all-out bloody screaming mistakes.

Accurate metaphor. Disturbing, and not easily purged from the mental viewscreen, but accurate.

The road test I recall referred to "spewing unburned liquid diesel out the tailpipe for 5 minutes after a start on a cold morning," and that was assuming you could persuade it to start at all.

Being able to say "well, at least it wasn't an Oldsmobile diesel" is damning with faint praise.

The contemporary Ford diesel was naturally aspirated, and was actually quite successful throughout the 80s. Yes, it got 200% better when they finally hung a turbo on it, spurred by Dodge releasing the Cummins turbo diesel, but it was perfectly acceptable as it was. The Nissan diesel was not acceptable under any definition.

Uh... no.

YES! I'd forgotten about that, but now you mention it, I remember laughing out loud and shaking my head when I read that.

Blowing raw fuel out after cold start is the symptom for glow plugs not working or not used on prechamber engines. No mystery why they wouldn't start.

That said the NA 3.3 was too small for the fullsize truck-unless you never need to go over 50 mph as was the case for some in-town vocational trucks. Many medium duty straight trucks were sold with four cylinder Cumminses and three or four cylinder Detroits which wouldn't do 55 mph with a van body up through the late sixties or early seventies. Many bread vans with gas engines wouldn't either. Had they used the turbo engine performance would have bettered the /6 which admittedly isn't saying much...

Properly used these are remarkable powerplants, but they are 200 CID...not 400.

Mm. So, three different sources telling the same fib due to malfunctioning glow plugs on three different engines, eh? Obviously, because otherwise it would mean the engines were garbage, and since Ted Azito says they are the very paragon of automotive powerplant engineering, that couldn't

*possibly* be so. Ignore the utter market failure of the engine; that's just a conspiracy to make Ted Azito look like he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

...blah blah blah...

Except for the fact that this article was written in 1978 and it was a BRAND NEW TRUCK!

Remarkably crappy, that is. The Cummins B5.9 is only 360 CID, and works just great in vehicles more than 4x the weight of a D-100, so the fact that its "only" 200 CID is no excuse.

You shouldn't need the glow plugs to ignite the fuel for very long after engine start. It is also a symptom of a very poorly calibrated fuel injection pump or improperly sized injectors.

Matt