Hi,

I've seen a lot of people here badmouthing over the reliability of the Cat 3208 series diesels, with some saying the Brazilian-made Ford/New Holland 7.8L six-bangers from the late 1980s being much better. Why all this trash talk over the Cat V-8s?

Some others, though, replaced the 3208, what Ford had initially referred to as the V-636 (just as Ford had called the prior Cat 1160 the V-225), with a GMC 351-cid V-6 gas engine, as evidenced in this picture of a 1973-79 Ford F-7000:



~Ben

 

The Cat 3208 is an absolute turd that could be outrun by a sleeping sloth. They are also throw away motors. It is cheaper to replace the motor with a reman than it is to repair them. Did I mention they are gutless?

 

Why are yall talking about this engine? I have been working on diesel's for 35 years and besides a IHC DT-V8 the 3208 was the worse. At the dealership's [Ford, Cat, and IHC ] we called them scatterpillars. They started off as 1100 series with scroll type fuel system's. And progressed to 3200's In a Cat tractor IT-28 it uses a 3204 which is one half of a 3208. I have worked on them in everything from Trucks to track type excavators. They all had one thing in common they have one [yes I said one] compession ring.Now can any Mechanic out there tell me why a diesel engine with only one compression ring will not have problems?

 

Which 3208 are yall talkiin about,, There was an A or a B... I personally like the big cam Cummins, But like they say, You either loveum or not. Its a specialty engine, kinda like Mack, but without the MAfIA curse... So the cat will either make ya, or break ya...

 

The A, B, C designations only applied to the heavy-duty 3300 and 3400 series, not the 3200s.

But, getting back to the 3208, were any of the low-speed turbocharged versions, rated 175 and 200 hp @ 2200 rpm (respective peak torque ratings 480 and 620 lbf/ft @ 1400 rpm) any better than their normally-aspirated 175/210 hp (2800 rpm speed) versions?

~Ben

 

The 3208 wasn't bad as power for a water pump or generator. They were noisy, hungry, but pretty reliable.

Made horrible truck engines, even with a turbo.

That's my opinion from being around diesel's most of my life!

 

Had one in a MF 1805 agri tractor. Loved it. Hardly did one rev before it started every time.

 

I adjusted the fuel & rpm on a truck that was 250hp and turbo, and holy cow....what a screamer! It had just come back from the shop with a new pump & injectors too. Up to 50mph, there wasnt any other trucks (that we had)that could beat it.
The 3208's get a lot of trash talk, and they deserve some of it. But....they start easy, run pretty quiet for a 10+ litre diesel, but run dirty/stinky. Not too many 10.4 litre diesels can spin to 3200 rpm either. All the new remans get 3 rings at least, or they're supposed to. There are better engines out there for that hp range, but if you have one, just take care of it.

 

My dad has one in a GMC topkick. Starts without ether, even down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit. It's non-turbo and the valve cover sticker states 210 HP. One of the neighbors has 4 White 4 wheel drive tractors with the 210 HP NA engines and hasn't had any problems and they run the hell out of them pullin honey wagons.

 

They do make the 3208 marinized to put out 400hp that being pleasure craft rating thou.

The 3208s always smoked blue and they had a distinctive exhaust smell.

Maybe not in the USA but in B.C. it is very hard to find parts for the old 3208s I was told used crank shafts are not available for the engine anymore and some other parts you can't get.

 

I realize I'm coming in after the party, but anyone who had reliability/longevity problems from the 3208 Caterpillar very obviously had no idea what they were doing.

In the 1980s, I was a fleet manager for a company providing dump truck services in a wide variety of environments: "we" hauled asphalt, clay, dirt, gravel, rip-rap and construction detritus (mainly reinforced concrete and rebar). Some of the sites we worked were remarkably well-prepared (highway jobs), but most were in developing pits inside tightly-constrained work sites, and similarly hardcore-austere conditions. All our trucks were Class 8, and nearly all ran the MT643 Allison; those that didn't, ran the MT653DR Allison -- with the exception of an old Mack with which the company had been started (237 and a 5-speed, if I correctly recall).

Most of our trucks had been used on short hauls, worked hard for nearly a million miles before we got them -- but the drivetrains had been, for the most part, well-maintained; unfortunately, they were 180-hp and 200-hp units; by contrast, our competition were all running 350-450 hp mills in newer trucks, with 9-13-speed manuals. The Allisons were often working beyond their published GVWR and about half the time, our trucks were loaded beyond-spec.

Initially, our trucks were performing about 95-98 percent as well as our competitors, although they had cost a small fraction to purchase; with the exception of 2 broken driveshafts and 2 broken frames (one of which broke 4 or 5 times before we hired a guy to come to our shop to do the repair), the 3208-powered trucks never gave us any problems (other than that they didn't have the "zoom" of the more powerful trucks). About 18 months in, we began rebuilding the 3208s in-house, for more power: all the internals were brought up to either 210-hp, 225- or 250-hp spec; I can't recall which, but the initial idea was to make all our engines the same, and to raise the output to a factory-certified level for reliability.

If I correctly recall, there was a reason we couldn't upgrade past a certain point, if we kept the blocks and heads with which we had started -- sort of like carriers working only with a particular range of gear ratios. Anyway, I think we had to stop at 210, but I can't swear to that; I do recall having initially thought that the bump in power was absurdly small and that it wouldn't be noticeable -- and perhaps not even measurable, in terms of the truck's performance; and I vividly recall having been stunned by the improvement: suddenly, our trucks were delivering 20-25 percent better performance than those of our competitors, whose performances hadn't dropped. Word of this got around fairly quickly, and we stayed busy.

The 3208 has an enviable record of reliability in construction machinery and equipment that runs continuously (or almost continuously) at full speed and under relatively constant load; ours used very little fuel, when contrasted against the work they were doing, and with one exception, they were absolutely bulletproof: that exception was when my ex-fiancee's dad exited the freeway too fast, and downshifted manually to second gear; the Allison made the switch, and 65,000 pounds rolling at roughly 60 mph attempted to spin the engine to turbine speeds -- so we ended up with a windowed block and one fewer employees. The transmission, driveshaft and axles were all okay! As I recall, we replaced the 3208 with a Ford 1160, which was basically the same engine.

We lost an Allison in an unrelated incident, when a truck at our shop rolled down a hill and the frame rail end crashed into a transmission we had mated to an engine: not the fault of the transmission, and we couldn't determine who had positioned the truck (and failed to chock the wheels); the engine and transmission were being readied for installation into that truck! <facepalm>

Perhaps the continual revving of the engine when it was used in a manual-transmission application accounts for the wear problems that other people had with the 3208, but they were dead-nuts reliable in our fleet.

The only other thing I can imagine as a possible explanation for any catastrophic failures not explained by spinning the engine to stratospheric rpm, is that the fluid coupling of the torque converter dampened vibrations that would otherwise have been transmitted into the engine -- and with a manual transmission, if the non-engine parts of the driveline were mismatched in a particular way, it is conceivable that the resulting vibrations transmitted into the engine basically overpowered the harmonic damper. That's not the fault of the engine, even though the engine is the component that more-or-less shattered from those vibrations.

Ordinarily with engines that rev through a comparatively wide rpm band (as in the case when manual transmissions are used), this isn't a problem, because the frequencies that would be catastrophic aren't present long enough to cause significant damage (which is in part why some racing engines forego the use of a harmonic damper); however, in comparatively long-term service -- conceivably in a few miles, or even a fraction of a mile -- the vibrations can be reinforced with disastrous effect. Again: not the engine's fault.

 

Holy thread resurrection!!!!

 

yepper and in reality they no worse than a 6.9 or 7.3 ... you just trying to compare Cats to Dogs