... and thank goodness for that!
You can put as many farkles as ya want on a slant six engine - but ya can't drop it in a truck and expect it work well.
When I was a kid I had one and good lord - it was slow, it was gutless, and it was the biggest POS in the world. It wasn't even good on gas! I could see this engine working in a smaller car or vehicle, but whoever at Dodge made the decision to put it in a truck? They should be taken out and shot!
Back in my oilfield days though, the slant six DID do well on providing power for PC pump top drives. In my field we had a lot of them and a few big Chev 454 V8's on the higher volume wells - and the V8's calved and died like clockwork while the slants just puttered along, day in day out - and ya only shut them down to drop the oil and fluids and change out the dryers.
Today they seem to have fallen by the wayside - I know Flapz' new full size company truck has a V6 that shuts itself off at red lights. I don't like that, but have to admit that thing has more spunk than the old slants ever did.
I like nostalgia and antiques as much as the next guy - but some things are better off left in the past.
My uncle used to swear by the old Darts with the slant 6! He was able to get over 250K miles out of those engines in a day when, if you rolled your car over 100K miles, you were doing something right. Yes, they were gutless and yes, if someone dropped a coke in the road, that liquid would find the (stupidly placed) distributor and kill the engine. They did, however, usually last longer than the bodies of the cars they were put in!
ReplyDeleteThe 454 was a dog! I had one of those boat anchors in my '86 Chevy C20. For such a big chunk of cast iron, it was gutless.
It got MAYBE 7 MPG on a good day, downhill, with a tailwind. It overheated if someone held a cigarette lighter in front of the radiator. It vaporlocked and crapped out at the absolute WORST possible times. It went through ignition modules at the rate of about one per year. THAT was an engine that should have never happened!
Never had a slant 6 but I think a buddy had one in a Dodge van but of course he wasn't worried about speed but how cool the van looked sitting still.
ReplyDeleteI had a 1962 Plymouth Savoy that had a slant six and three on the tree. The engine outlasted the car.
ReplyDelete