[KEENSY85]

Gwagensteve wrote:

L Series engines weigh WAY over 100kg.

I'd suggest up to twice the weight of a G16B - 180KG would be a fair guess.

If you are considering this as a conversion into a sierra, I'd strongly advise against it. L engines are a pretty poor diesel, even taking into account that putting a diesel in a suzuki is a silly idea.

Steve.

IMHO the reason the commodore motors are considered boat anchors is more to do with very low HP/L than their outright weight. Cummins Diesels are really heavy, but nobody calls them a boat anchor because they're a decent motor when used in the right application. The 3.8V6 is a cheap and crappy motor designed for cheap and crappy buicks, pontiacs and oldsmobiles in the mid 80's. It's an example of everything that was (is?) wrong with the US car industry - were up The fact that this motor (and the falcon six) continued to be used for as long as they were/are is due to the lack of other suitable RWD platforms world wide and the tiny production volumes associated with the Australian market.

The alloy tech motor isn't a bad thing at all, because it was engineered as a modern "world market" motor, with provision for multivalve heads, direct injection etc.

The 3.8's combustion chamber design is so poor they require a huge plug gap to keep them running at idle (this is from Bosch, not an internet rumour)

My mate who owns a wreckering yard x2 tells me all the time he loves crumy door motors because they always SELL every time .He started sending containers of scrap engine's and geerboxs to India when scrap prices were high, they were literally filled with clapped out commodore v6 engines ford geerboxs and low km ford engines,so I recon the commodore motors arant the best I like the way they perform thou a lot , ford engines hardly die he recons,and no I don't own a for or Holden I own a turbo Subaru and I'm building a Suzi so I don't think I'm biest at all

[Fatzook]

The ford inline 6 is renound for doing head gaskets. Otherwise they are pretty reliable.

[yogibear187]

haha ill keep it in mind and why i am asking? coz i wanted opions

[Fatzook]

yogibear187 wrote:

why i am asking? coz i wanted opions

Well there is no shortage of those around here

[2stroker]

I actually think that the v6 commodore engine is not really as bad as people make them out to be, they are reliable, easy to work on, cheap for parts and a lot more ecnomical than their competition.

In this thread I have read:

- Old tech - well not much more old tech than a g16b apart from cast iron block, they both have 2 valves per cyl, basic electronics and basic efi system (at least they dont crack blocks)

- Poor power per litre - not much in it realy, a G16b, 68kw or 3.8 at 150kw, it works out at 42kw per litre Verse 39kw per litre (the torque per litre has the 3.8 way in front)

I would not put one in a Suzuki but in the car they came in, a cheap full sized family general duty vehicle I think they are are fine.

[3cyl]

Couldn't count how many V6 commys died to build rock crawlers, not my idea of a good street zook engine though.

[2stroker]

Yeah 3cyl, it is just that they are cheap and readily available I rekon

[Fatzook]

2stroker wrote:

Yeah 3cyl, it is just that they are cheap and readily available I rekon

That they are. Which is why they make a great buggy motor.

[Gwagensteve]

yogibear187 wrote:

can you tell me why isnt such a bad idea?

i have spent big dollars on moding other cars before and am pretty dead set ondoing this.

and it will be built for rock cralwing

38+s , 5l/3l turbo , partol diffs , all custom drop arms and coli's . all this in a lwb soft top

one thing i dont under stand is why you allare baging out the 5l's? i have 1kz in my hilux (very close to the same thing) and its great i dont see many zooks with torue like this and abiltiy to do 100 up any hill
im happy to hear your opion But i fail to see how it could be a bad thing

If you are pretty dead seat on doing it,then nothing we can say is going to make any difference. Knock yourself out.

However, if you are generally interested in our opinion then we'll be more than happy to provide it.

I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to achieve.

Let's look at Rock Crawling:

I don't know how much rock crawling you've done, but a well geared car doesn't need anything like the torque of a well-turbocharged 3L or 5L. I've owned a well turboed 3L. It made great torque, but like most turbo diesels, had poor throttle response compared to a NA diesel, let alone a decent N/A engine, but rock has traction, and engine torque isn't anywhere near as important as gearing reduction, and if you need to punch the car up ledges etc, rev range is far more important than peak Nm. 85Nm is plenty to spin the tyres when you have limited traction, and plenty to drive the car if you do have traction and have the right gearing.

Next, there's no easy automatic for a 3L/5L that mates to a gear drive hilux transfer/doubler to get the gearing to work. (And you'll need transfer gearing, as with 4.6 or 4.88 ratio in the patrol diffs and 38's, you'll need gearing in the transfer.

With all this work done, it's pretty hard to see how the finished product will be superior to a hilux with cro-mo axles in it for technical rock work, or a shitty old auto GQ on gas. It's certainly going to be as big, roughly as heavy (which isn't even relevant for rock crawling), and a truckload more work. I guess if you bust out multilink suspension etc it might flex better than a hilux, but flex is mostly overrated and there's lots of things you can get wrong and end up with a wobbly, unreliable mess, and a GQ is already 1/2 mutilinked, and a front flex is as close as a phone call.

So let's assume you're actually going to road drive this thing, where the 300Nm+ might be useful. I'm going to bet my left knacker that the end result will be far, far, nastier to drive than a hilux or patrol. My guess is you won't road drive it far. And that's fine, but if the motor choice is for road use, that's a waste of an expensive engine/turbo combination (and all the hassles of fitting them) that's not required once you are in the bush.

It's not even "something different", it's just different to you. Many people have tried various combinations of the stuff you're discussing.

I guess that I can't really make sense of the build you are planning. I can't work out where it's going to be better off road than a much simpler build of a sierra (or better as an all-round car than a hilux or patrol)

I don't know how much time you've spent with big cars on the terrain you are planning on driving, or with a well built, simple sierra.

Lots of people have planned builds like yours. Very few finish them, I've seen a few similar builds (with Diesels, commodore motors, patrol diffs, coils/hilux diffs etc) and they rarely achieve what the builders set out to achieve. In my experience, they have moved to a much lighter, simpler suzuki based build (and achieved the same/more capability) or moved to a big car.

Just some thoughts.

Steve.


PS. There's NO comparison between a 3L/5L and a 1Kz. There's a reason Toyota built the 1Kz rather than trying to build a factory turbo 3L. They don't really turbo that well.

[Sledge]

Short and Dry. 240kg

[Gwagensteve]

Wow, a 9.5 year grave dig, that's quite some effort.

Nice to see all the old faces on this thread though.

I wonder how yogibear187's swap went? Should have a few years of driving on it now so their reflections on how successful the swap was would be valuable.

[Gwagensteve]

I see old Yogi hasn't visited the forum since December 30 2012, so maybe the conversion was finished then and he's been too busy driving it, or perhaps it's an unfinished project.

I started a thread on the Suzuki Sierra Lovers age on FB, which is now a sticky, asking for specific, first hand information from anyone who has EVER diesel swapped a Sierra. Considering it's practically a prerequisite of that page to have or be building a turbo G13B Sierra, I assumed someone on there would have also built a Diesel Sierra considering a diesel Sierra would be "awesome" (for unspecified reasons) and anyone who suggests it isn't is a hater that needs to be stoned to death.

In the eight months that post has been up and after 68 replies, only one person has posted with a conversion they carried out, using a Gemini diesel. Unfortunately they had very little useful tech to add and the car was sold on years before.

I have seen an excellent diesel conversion of a Vitara using the Renault engine as per the European market Vitara, however, considering it used parts imported from the Euro market diesel vitara, it's less of a conversion and more mixing in parts from another market. Not knocking it at all, it's just not quite the same as building a diesel Sierra.

I'm genuinely surprised that this is such a tech vacuum when A) Apparently so many people are convinced this is the best idea ever and B) Apparently every second Sierra in the US has a VW diesel in it. (None of which actually fit, but that's a different issue)

[fordem]

Gwagensteve wrote:

I'm genuinely surprised that this is such a tech vacuum when A) Apparently so many people are convinced this is the best idea ever and B) Apparently every second Sierra in the US has a VW diesel in it. (None of which actually fit, but that's a different issue)

Are you really Steve?

My suspicion is that there are either many conversions abandoned unfinished, or owner's disappointed with the end result and unwilling to talk about it - even if they got it to a point where it was drivable, they can't get it to do what they want or it doesn't deliver what they expected and they eventually toss in the towel.

Look back two posts to your August 13, 2012 post -

[Gwagensteve]

I genuinely am surprised. Poor decision making and poor performance when complete have never been a barrier to people aggressively defending how awesome their modification is - for evidence, look at the whole SPOA movement of the late 90's early 2000's. So many cars build SPOA but few of them were reliable or trustworthy enough to take 4WDing but their owners were outrageously defensive of them.

I don't actually think that many conversions are started. Suzuki owners are cheapskates and diesels are expensive. Many years ago it was possible to buy whole diesel Holden Geminis for very little so that's why most of the conversions done locally were 1.8 Isuzu. Obviously, in the US, the Jetta/Beetle 1.9 motors are readily available, especially in the rust belt, so donor motors are cheap. Once something is cheap, it seems the cheapness overrules almost any other consideration so poor performance from a worn out diesel (1.8 Isuzu) or the fact the engine doesn't fit (VW) these are obviously the right engines for the job.

Why I'm surprised there is a tech vacuum is it would have to be in the top 5 modifications people claim they want to do. (or more accurately, "tell me they are doing") yet as soon as I ask any questions about, say, resolving gearing for a low revving motor, the response is always "the engine has torque" or "I'll just get custom transfer gears made" or some other reply that proves the question wasn't understood. Why are (apparently) all these people out there not getting together and solving these problems?

I'm on the Diesel Suzuki FB page, which is all about people discovering the engines don't fit, none of the actual problems of putting a diesel in a Suzuki seem to be discussed.

[Boatbeard]

Dead thread revivals are great!

Many years ago when looking into that allegedly popular diesel swap into yank zooks it seemed pretty obvious that it was of much more limited use than gossip would have us believe... There seems to have been a fairly narrow time period when cheap jettas or rabbits or whatever the donor vehicle is were freely and cheaply available in wreckers. There is only one or two engines that work, and one of them really only puts out similar horsepower to the stock 1.3 petrol engine, with a noticeable torque improvement but no real top end power improvement (and at limited rpm...). So it seems there is just the one turbo engine that wasn't hugely common anyway that could be made to work without too much effort - but as soon as that engine availability dried up in cheap numbers it became a completely unviable swap compared to any regular petrol option... At no time did that ideal VW engine even get sold into Oz anyway, maybe as a grey import i guess but no wrecker I ever spoke to had heard of them. Apart from the Gemini diesel here in Oz I can't see what other diesel engine was physically small enough and light enough that would be worth squeezing into any zook I've seen. Easier to just graft a Zook body onto a Hilux and be done with it in one go I reckon... The USA Samurai forum had a whole thing on it like a full builders guide with all the bits you needed to find and what you needed to make it work - but it was very certain it was not worth doing unless you can get the engine and other parts for bugger all.

[Sausager]

There is a vehicle in the local winch challenge scene here in New Zealand that is running this exact combo - 5L, patrol diffs, coilovers, SJ Ute cab and 2/3 of a chassis. It wins a lot of events, so it is a combo that works. It is extremely capable, is low geared (Steve was right!), but also very cool.

However

It is a full, ground up, dedicated offroad vehicle build, built by a professional fabricator. It's a motor with big grippy wheels, and a winch, and very little is still Suzuki. Probably a bit outside of the realm that OP was chasing!

Check it out here: https://www.wallycustoms.com/post/no-98