I saw a magazine article once about a cummins in a Dakota. They had to
re-locate the firewall like 3" back to make it fit. Seems like too much
trouble to me.
The Liberty diesel is pretty anemic, a former friend had one, all I can
remember him saying about it other than good fuel economy is that he
wished it had the skidplate package after his wife punched a hole in the
oilpan trying to drive over a tree in their driveway (women!). As I
recall that diesel was designed for a tractor in Europe by VM Motori,
which is now owned by Detroit Diesel. Make your own conclusions as to
this being bad or good. ;)
The Sprinter V6 is decent from what little I've heard, it's used in
several other Merc vehicles. The I5 though is well known for heads that
crack and a nightmare of a computerized boost control system, and
earlier models had known headgasket blowing issues. All these things
are why they started putting the V6 diesel in the Sprinter. Oh, and
from what I've heard, a good reman for the I5 from Chrysler runs
$11,000+. You can find them for $7-8k online, but when you can find a
good reman 360 V8 for ~$1800 and a "performance" one for $2300 and have
more power than any of the above short of the Cummins... yikes.
The GC 3.0 I have no idea on... any of the listed choices is going to be
a wiring nightmare, though.
MattB
On 11/28/2009 12:26 AM, Barry Oliver wrote:
>
> Was driving home tonight at 1:30 AM and for some reason I started
> thinking about diesel conversions for my Dakota. Understand that I am
> half asleep right now, so there is definitely a bit of Tom-Think(tm)
> going on, but I was wondering, what donor motors could be used, and
> what would be the advantages of each?
>
> Ram Cummins: the obvious choice, but entirely too big to be a really
> practical conversion?
>
> Liberty CRD: The size is prolly right, but the power seems anemic and
> it's probably hard to find
>
> GC 3.0L: This seems like a better choice both from a size and power
> profile....
>
> Sprinter V6 [possibly the same v6 from the GC?] or I5: can be had in
> a factory turbo config, and these are designed to be more truck
> engines as compared to the liberty/grand varieties..
>
> What else?
>
> Understand, this was a product of 2 hours of tired, turkey stuffed,
> driving boredom. I haven't looked any of this up yet. In fact if I
> don't hit send, I likely won't even remember this tomorrow morning...
> Yup, lotsa Tom-Think(tm) going on tonight.
>
> So, what motor would you chose and why? If it were me, I would want
> as close to bolt in and factory trouble free as I could get. I am
> sure you could get one of the 6.7L's stuffed in there if you tried
> hard enough, but the end result would look like those S10 V8
> conversions....Bleah.
>
>
>
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