Originally Posted by johnsdiesel

Bob, the I-6 Hemi Diesel is a fictitious engine that we've made up to satisfy the Dodge fans on this board.

Originally Posted by Tim Lamkin

Got me

Hook line and sinker...or should I say stinker

Originally Posted by johnsdiesel

Bob, the I-6 Hemi Diesel is a fictitious engine that we've made up to satisfy the Dodge fans on this board.

Originally Posted by Lectrocuted

I heard that Ford hired the former Iraqi Minister of Information as it's quality spokesman.

Originally Posted by 04F250CC60

Also straight 6's are great in an OTR application because you've got a multitude of gears to keep the motor humming along in it's powerband. That's the downfall in the Dodge. Not enough gears. Twist that Cummins up to 4 grand and do the same with a 6.0 Powerstroke and hold it there and wait for the Cummins to Cummapart!

Originally Posted by Marine Ironman

Two very bad things stand out immediately. First, dodge does not provide their torque-curve which literally is almost a mere spike at its max of 1600 rpm (a spike is bad). But get this ... the max power does not come until way up at 2900 rpm, which is way DOWN on the torque curve. This means inefficiency. I would guess the max torque range quickly falls off in +/- 50 rpm of the 1600 rpm center. (the previous Cummins 5.9 did)


So ... with a 600 Cummins diesel, how does one shift and utilize a thorn-looking spiked up torque curve? Well, the options are a 48RE Auto 4-speed or a 5600 NV Manual 6-speed transmission. Let's examine:

(a) 48RE (http://www.transtarindustries.com/newsltr.asp?aID=84)

According to this spec sheet, the 48RE is not designed for the 600 cummins, and has had to have parts re-creation and substitution to adapt. Combined with the fact that there are a mere 4 gears to use, and no control system optimally designed from the ground-up to match trany with engine ... you are left with a nightmare which CANNOT properly utilize the teensy 1550-1650 rpm high-torque range, programming or not. Thus, a serious truck buyer should not give up his hard-earned money for this auto, unless you drive your truck around just for the looks of it (which Dodge apparently must be banking on for a lot of their buyers).

(b) So, you are only left with the 5600 NV 6-speed manual to deal with it, and let's examine that (http://www.motivegear.com/Transmissi...ent_trans.html)
They claim "smooth" shifting (of course ... its marketing). The specs link given reveals the Achilles heel. The 5600 NV is ONLY RATED FOR 550 ft-lbs OF TORQUE!!! What? Incredibly, what has happened here is that Dodge has slapped on a rush-to-market solution. They know that with manual shifting no one can ever reasonably keep an engine in the 1550 to 1650 rpm range, and certainly not with only 6 gears (you would need 10 at least if not more). So, they have made a great business call in hoping that failures will come after warranties (due to the mere sturdiness of the trany), but only after they first get a good boost in sales for the near term.

IN REVIEW:
We see that Dodge as rushed a catchup-with-Ford after-market solution 600 series Cummins engine with a smorgasbord of transmissions which are not optimally matched, and in fact not even rated for the engine at all in the case of the 5600 manual . So what have we learned?
(1) Do not buy the 600 Cummins with 48RE auto, as it won't even know where 1600 rpm is, much less stay within 50 rpm of it. Additionally 4 gears will do practically nothing for you, and they are spaced out in an impractical manner. No diesel should so few gears, unless it is huge cargo-ship which is designed to sit at a narrow rpm for days-on-end traversing the ocean.
(2) If you buy the 5600 NVG because you have no real option, then unless you have God-like shifting powers there is no chance you can use 6-gears to keep in 1600 rpm. And once there, are you always going to drive down the road at exactly 1600 rpm? No. And thus you will fall off down the torque-curve, probably cruising at about 2000 rpm or more, and I would guess at 25% less torque than the 6.0L PSD if not lower. When you do buy it SELL IT AT NO MORE THAN 150K miles, because eventually the under-rated trany will begin cracking apart from fatigue failures, especially if you do try to drive constantly at 1600 rpm, giving it 50 ft-lb more of torque than it can handle.


Thus, the typical Ford 6.0L PSD driving down the road is staying at near-max torque over a large shifting and cruising band of 2000-3000 rpm. The Dodge whizzing past you driven by a misled Dodge enthusiast is straining at 3300 rpm to get by you ... but is putting at least 1/3 less torque to the wheels because he is way off the spikey peak of 1600 rpm for the torque maxum. Or, he may be dawdling along exactly at 1600 rpm to get his max torque ... but in so doing he is (a) breaking his 5600 NV transmission and (b) causing a 100-car lineup behind him of people trying to pass around him. But ... he's got his "600 ft-lbs" of torque and a false belief that he is somehow outperforming a Ford just because one-point on the whole curve is higher.

David
B.S. - Naval Architecture
M.S. - System Engineering

Originally Posted by jeb

Not to mention the rear main seal issues, EGR issues, FICM issues, blown turbo issues, romps, etc, etc. Ford does seem to be getting a handle on it all but it's still not fixed, IMO. Just the fact, as mentioned above, about them turning off the quiet idle on all of the 6.0's (Pilot Injection) speaks volumes about this issue, IMO.

Originally Posted by 150ford

What they have bought back is a fraction of 1%..

Originally Posted by Marine Ironman

http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/05/news...ies/autosales/

According to this (Jan 1^st) GM sells are down 9%, Ford down 4% and Dodge down 4%.

<o> </o>

https://www.ford-trucks.com/news/2004/news2004-4.html

However at Ford, the truck sales were up in Jan04 (compared to Jan03) 10% (61,979) despite that. January 04 total truck sales were 230,036. Of that 61,979 were the F-series and 1552 were the excursion. Let’s say that 60% of that is diesel, that’s 38.1K, which is about 457K diesels in a year. Times two years of the PSD being out (2004 car year is virtually over) that means about 914K PSD’s sold.

<o> </o>

Scrolling forward 6 months at: http://media.ford.com/print_doc.cfm?article_id=18556

<o> </o>

We see that June 04 F-series sales are 74,935 and excursion is about 1,832 for the month. That’s another increase of … wow … 21%.
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According to: http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=18637

Ford F-series is <st1lace w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">America</st1:country-region></st1lace>’s best selling vehicle, with the 10^th month in a row of sales increase.

<o> </o>

Here is the source for the “500” buy-backs (actually ~475 per the last paragraph): http://www.autosafety.org/article.php?did=834&scid=93

However, this same article states that the new 6.0L diesel “remains popular among truck buyers.”

<o> </o>

So what I conclude from this is that we have about 475 buy-backs (i.e. not repairable under warranty) of about 900K diesels all together, which is still at 99.95% for the first two years. Those are very good numbers considering the introduction of such a new and complicated vehicle. Of course, the buy-backs have been greatly diminished or eliminated at this point, except for random variability that may cause a defect. On the other hand Ford truck sales are sky-high, and extrapolating from the June 2004 sales figures of 194,801 total trucks … that comes out to 2.3 million trucks annually.

<o> </o>

Therefore, I don’t see any issue w/ the PSD, and certainly not for my Jan 2004 X-cursion.

Originally Posted by ga302p

You do not need a broad powerband in a diesel engine. You need a transmission that can make efficient use of a narrow powerband. The I makes plenty of H.P. and plenty of torque and makes it at low RPM. The problem is Dodge does not have a transmission that is capable of efficiently using the output of the I. I am not defending Dodge at all. .

Originally Posted by 04F250CC60

This is all your opinion correct? The true purpose of diesel.? Patent # 608,845 that Rudolph Diesel recieved for the invention of the Diesel internal combustion engine does not state the purpose of the engine. That was 1894 technology. He found that air mixed with fuel that is highly compressed will ignite just from thermal dynamics. His first engine exploded on him. Nearly killing him. He found that this engine will have to be built much stronger to withstand the high compression needed for power. This also made the engine heavy. Thus making it impractical for smaller use. So the engine found use in factories, powerplants, and large industrial equipment.
.

Originally Posted by Marine Ironman

Dspencer,
As of June 04 sales figures, Ford is selling 74,000 F-series and 2,000 excursions per month.

Now in the article it gives this info:

• the 6.0PSD was introduced in Dec (02)
• the 6.0 it outselling the old 7.3 by 15%
• 16,000 PSD's were sold in July, setting a new Ford diesel record

Okay let's stop there. the 95K sold in August is a reasonable total with the 16K record for July 03, assuming it had gone up each month. That must mean most ford trucks sold are 150's. So at 16K per year we have 192K PSD's per year, and we know the sales have gone up 10% and then 21% in 2004. So that would be about 210K PSD's for the 2004 year, which we are half-through, so 105K PSD's then so far in 04, plus 192K for 03 means Ford has sold about:

• 297K PSD's since Dec 02

The article then goes on to say this:

• The PSD problems are confined to the first 5 months of production
• The first 66.7K PSD's sold were recalled and had the fuel injectors (made by siemens) fixed
• The software has been updated twice (no big deal, they should update it at regular maintenance intervals if necessary)
• The latest computer problems have been solved
• 475 engines were bought back due to inability to fix

So, the 475 is a number which does not continue to grow into the future, as problems were fixed by month-5. We have then 475 of 297K engines that were bad and not re-workable. That's a quality rate of 99.84% for the actual production population. This exceeds +/- 3 sigma quality limits of 99.73% for a normal distribution.

But, for arguments sake, despite any lack of evidence, let's assume that 50 more have been bought back since Aug of 03 until June of 04. I highly doubt this, but let's see how the numbers come out. 525 of 297K gives a variablity of 99.82%. Hmmm. Still exceeds +/- 3 sigma for quality control. How many PSD's would have to be sold back to fail 3 sigma control limits? Well one minus .9973 is a 0.0027 failure rate, which times 297K comes out to:

• 802 PSD's would have to be bought back

But, of course, we don't see any evidence of that. So what we see is that Ford & International have stepped out on the next technology horizon w/ a V-8 and transmission, stayed within 6 sigma quality control limits for the production population, have boosted sales 15% higher than the 7.3L, and appear to be ever-growing in truck sales.

Now, I'm not spinning anything here. It seems to me that no matter how you do the math, Ford sells such a high quantity of trucks that even a normal distribution prediction on failure rate would predict 800 engine failures. Of course, Ford wants probably far less failures than that, and so we must be looking at many more sigmas than 6, meaning .... quality runs high in the Ford production lines.

Do we have any numbers on GM and their diesels?

The Ironman