The GM 6.2l L87 Disaster

[ssjones]

You can swing a cat here and hit five Tesla's. I think we have five plus in our small neighborhood.

Chevy is desperate to sell the Silverado EV, based on their sales, I doubt we'll see a EV Tahoe anytime soon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/silverado-ev

 

[Briar Lee]

You can swing a cat here and hit five Tesla's. I think we have five plus in our small neighborhood.

Chevy is desperate to sell the Silverado EV, based on their sales, I doubt we'll see a EV Tahoe anytime soon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/silverado-ev

The first house in the world was built by some man whose wife wanted to move out of a perfectly good cave.

My wife wants a newer Suburban than the one she has, which is reasonable.

She has terrible back problems, which means heated seats are required.

She has a habit of buying lots of garden stuff, which means a real Suburban and no Tahoe wanna be almost Suburbans, which also ride better and can carry lots of children, than a mere Tahoe.

She’s very happy with her 5.3, but only because she’s not driven a 6.2 of course.

The day that mother test drives a full sized Suburban that has close to a thousand horsepower and three thousand foot pounds of torque that doesn’t require a man to pump gas in it, the highest and best use for old 6.2 Suburbans will be donor cars for street rods.

The gasoline buggy is a dead man walking.

If America can somehow postpone another Great Recession a few years, we’ll all live to see the last brand new gasoline powered light vehicle.

Some old bachelor in Idaho will buy it.

 

[BingBong]

Just saw this on Rainman Ray's channel. Apparently GM's finally going to replace the affected engines.

A bit of flim-flam on the oil instructions, should shift some filler cap units for those who already switched and now have to switch back. That 50 mile engine clip though... what did they make that crank with? Pastry?

 

[Briar Lee]

You must be smoking something besides tobacco in those Algerian briars.

I’ve been conservative all my life.

There weren’t any liberals a half mile south of Bug Tussle.

But that also means I’ve been dead wrong and a dinosaur about every advancement in motor vehicles.

In our family’s new 1965 Ford Galaxie, there were these dad blasted seat belts. If you fastened them and you ran off the road in a pond you might drown trying to get out.

Later on, my mother’s 1977 Cutlass had electronic ignition and steel belted radials and a catalytic converter. About a dozen years ago that Cutlass was still running with almost 300,000 miles on it and it might be yet, I’ve not seen the owner I sold it to when I put 150,000 miles on it recently.

All dangerous liberal automotive inventions turned out to be better. Every last one, every last time.

If my wife had driven a vehicle that did not burn gasoline and would run away and hide, just utterly destroy, her Suburban, I’d be out with her shopping for one.

What I thought was a nice sedan was a 2021 Tesla.

And the owner will not ever buy a gasoline car at any price ever again.

 

[telescopes]

I’ve been conservative all my life.

Which Earth? Not on 616, LOL

 

[Briar Lee]

Which Earth? Not on 616, LOL

Conservative in that I hate change.

What if those Beatles hadn’t came over here from England and brought all that long hair with them?

I wish there were still prosperous little towns like Humansville was, when all the men wore hats (not baseball caps) and the women dresses and only old sailors had tattoos, their wives apologized for and explained he’d gotten in while in the service.

I wish Saginaw Michigan was still on every juke box.

But today is better, than then.

We have more guns, cars, tools, toys, and stuff than we ever dreamed of and even the poorest people have air conditioning and central heat.

 

[telescopes]

Conservative in that I hate change.

What if those Beatles hadn’t came over here from England and brought all that long hair with them?

I wish there were still prosperous little towns like Humansville was, when all the men wore hats (not baseball caps) and the women dresses and only old sailors had tattoos, their wives apologized for and explained he’d gotten in while in the service.

I wish Saginaw Michigan was still on every juke box.

But today is better, than then.

We have more guns, cars, tools, toys, and stuff than we ever dreamed of and even the poorest people have air conditioning and central heat.

Traditional might be a more accurate word to use in this case.

 

[Richmond B. Funkenhouser]

Dad blasted seat belts. If you fastened them and you ran off the road in a pond you might drown trying to get out.

You might.

The fact that seatbelts might kill you never went away just because they decided to illegally force them on us.

 

[Briar Lee]

You might.

The fact that seatbelts might kill you never went away just because they decided to illegally force them on us.

This car I’m sitting in has more airbags than I can count.


Still yet, on long trips I buckle up.


Seat belts are dangerous to seven year olds though.

Daddy had that 352 Y block four barrel wound up in our brand new 1965 Galaxie 500 going across Kansas and I was studying the new seat belts which were tucked down behind the front seats and they were anchored to a big bolt under a plastic cover.

I wondered if that bolt was hot.

It was.

I couldn’t say anything because Mama had told me not to bother anything in her new car, but that hurt.

The worst electric car has more range than a middle sixties Detroiter.

We had to stop for gas about every 150 miles.

Then in Colorado there were signs out all over

MOUNTAIN TUNE

$10

If you tried to drive up Pike’s Peak overheated cars were everywhere.

Cars a year or two old required having the valves ground.

They needed new points and plugs and u joints and mufflers and they rusted and soon burned oil and left blue smoke trails you’d see. The shocks didn’t last more than a year or two and neither did the batteries. The paint didn’t last but three or four years at most.

The good old days were actually pretty bad, we just didn’t know any better.

 

[Dave760]

A bit of flim-flam on the oil instructions, should shift some filler cap units for those who already switched and now have to switch back. That 50 mile engine clip though... what did they make that crank with? Pastry?

My best guess: Someone, somewhere decided they could shave a few micro-dollars off of the cost of some engine parts and no-one would be any the wiser. Whoops!

The damage on some of these engines is truly breathtaking. Bearings that got so hot that the steel was blued. I'd have thought something else would have to give way with that much heat in the vicinity.

 

[Dave760]

In our family’s new 1965 Ford Galaxie, there were these dad blasted seat belts. If you fastened them and you ran off the road in a pond you might drown trying to get out.

Sorry to throw in this useless bit of trivia, but the first car I owned was a '65 Galaxie. Of course it was 14 years old at the time and the New Mexico sun had turned the paint on the hood into...something that didn't resemble paint. But I remember how the seatbelts looked brand new. I suspect the owners never used them.

(Having both been in accidents when I was wearing a seatbelt, and having arrived at the scene of a couple of accidents where people chose not to wear them, let me add this: Please wear seatbelts.

Oh, and keep your feet off of the dashboard. Airbags beat leg bones every time.)

 

[Briar Lee]

My best guess: Someone, somewhere decided they could shave a few micro-dollars off of the cost of some engine parts and no-one would be any the wiser. Whoops!

The damage on some of these engines is truly breathtaking. Bearings that got so hot that the steel was blued. I'd have thought something else would have to give way with that much heat in the vicinity.

General Motors has made countless millions of push rod V-8 engines since 1955.

When I was in the FFA in 1973 we toured a GM final assembly plant in Kansas City. Out those cars came, one a minute. I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did those human wage slaves working there, but I was told the money was fantastic.

Somewhere else there had to be a factory assembling engines, but I can’t imagine it was an assembly line like final assembly.

The bottom end of those engines and the ones in the cars I saw in 1973 are absolutely identical. No differences at all how they were put together.

This was a quality control issue.

What else could it be?

And, the 5.3 engines aren’t included.

In 1973 a good V-8 would run trouble free more than 100,000 miles and today it’s much, much more because of better tolerances.

How did GM screw this up?

 

[Briar Lee]

Sorry to throw in this useless bit of trivia, but the first car I owned was a '65 Galaxie. Of course it was 14 years old at the time and the New Mexico sun had turned the paint on the hood into...something that didn't resemble paint. But I remember how the seatbelts looked brand new. I suspect the owners never used them.

(Having both been in accidents when I was wearing a seatbelt, and having arrived at the scene of a couple of accidents where people chose not to wear them, let me add this: Please wear seatbelts.

Oh, and keep your feet off of the dashboard. Airbags beat leg bones every time.)

I read all the owner’s manual going across Kansas.

That 1965 was essentially a reskinned 1960 like we traded in but the new one was as stylish as a starship.

It also had power steering and power brakes over the 1960.

The blue paint kept rubbing off. Ford painted it more than once.

I think it had an EGR valve instead of a bypass to let the blow by off, but maybe that was the 1970 Chevy.

 

[Dave760]

General Motors has made countless millions of push rod V-8 engines since 1955.

When I was in the FFA in 1973 we toured a GM final assembly plant in Kansas City. Out those cars came, one a minute. I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did those human wage slaves working there, but I was told the money was fantastic.

Somewhere else there had to be a factory assembling engines, but I can’t imagine it was an assembly line like final assembly.

The bottom end of those engines and the ones in the cars I saw in 1973 are absolutely identical. No differences at all how they were put together.

This was a quality control issue.

What else could it be?

And, the 5.3 engines aren’t included.

In 1973 a good V-8 would run trouble free more than 100,000 miles and today it’s much, much more because of better tolerances.

How did GM screw this up?

I don't want to get into too much detail here as I might still be under an NDA, but I worked for a couple of companies that worked with the auto industry over the years.

(I toured a bunch of auto plants during my career. Amazing places. And stories I wish I could tell.)

The business changed a lot over the last fifty years. Auto companies don't really build cars any more. They hire suppliers to do that. Today if you go, for example, into the paint shop at an auto plant, everyone you see works for the company that supplies the paint (either as an employee or as a contractor). The same is true almost everywhere in the plant. They're all members of the same union but they work for the suppliers.

The contracting process is really fascinating. If you get the contract to supply widgets for the plant, you get the contract for a fixed amount of time (perhaps 10 years). In year one they'll give you a price for your widgets, but you'll be contracted to drop that price every year throughout the contract period. By year ten you might be expected to provide widgets for 60% of the year-one price. Contracts will have renegotiation clauses for certain events, like raw material shortages and high inflation, but the auto companies really do want prices to drop over time. This puts a lot of pressure on suppliers.

I don't know how the contracts work for engines or engine parts, but I suspect suppliers are given standards that their parts have to meet. The thing I wonder about with the 6.2l engines is whether the standards the engine manufacturer received were appropriate, or whether the parts weren't tested correctly. I am aware of instances of the first, where the standards provided by the auto maker were not good enough. And I've definitely seen instances of suppliers providing sub-par products.

One of the downsides of retirement: I no longer have access to the folks who could tell me what really happened here. Which is probably for the best given that this would be just one more thing I wouldn't be allowed to talk about.