im looking at a 93 chevy 3500 with a 6.5 but the owner says the radiator is building pressure and theres water in the oil. now the question is anyone know how hard it would be to put a cummins in place of the 6.5? or any other suggestions oh the truck is clean and selling for 2k.

oh motherfucker I typed out a big reply and the board gave me an error when I hit submit. THANKS...

OK so here we go trying again. The 6.5 from 1993 is said by some to be the "best" of the 6.5 early engines because it has mechanical injection, no problems from that electronic injector setup. They also say it has a strong block. Idunno. I see a LOT of 6.5's with cracked heads, cracked blocks around the main bearing area, starter bolt hole threads pulled out, starter pads cracked...these engines have a bad reputation and for the most part they deserve it if you ask me. That's just in case you needed any more ammo to convince yourself to dump the original engine.

As far as conversions, the 12 valve Cummins is the "easy" one to do since it doesn't take any fancy electronics to make it run. I think there's a company out there offering some adapters and stuff but I have no idea what their name is. Every now and then a converted truck comes up on eBay and the seller claims they bought it that way and have no idea who did the swap...probably just to save themselves answering a ton of questions.

Think about what transmission you're going to run. If that '93 has an automatic, it'll be a 4L80E, and the ECM in that '93 will be for the transmission ONLY - this is the hot ticket for an engine swap if you're going to retain the 4L80E.

If you find that adapter/swap company ask a lot of questions. It seems like when I see the converted trucks, someone always stops before it's 100% usually around the speedometer/cruise or possibly A/C.

For $2K that truck better be damn clean, consider the engine to be junk and worthless so you're buying a truck without an engine for $2K - think about that. It's hard to sell even a good running 6.5 truck because of their reputation. I see them on CL all the time, posted over and over and over...

Richard

i rarely see any duallies on CL here unless its 20k plus or all beat to hell. in fact thats where i found that truck.

What years are the good 6.5 motors coming in?

None of 'em, if you ask me, but that's just my opinion. Not trying to slam anyone running the 6.5 but they just seem like a ticking timebomb. I DO know there's people out there with a bazillion miles on them but they just seem to be the lucky ones. Hell I've got two dead ones in my lot right now.

Richard

Buy a 1st gen 12 valve 6BT Cummins. From everything I've read you have to weld the Cummins motor mounts to your frame, then custom trans x-member. You also have to remember to position it to make room for rad/cooler. I'll post some links on Cummins/Chevy swaps. It is all trial and error.

http://www.4btswaps.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4868

I thought I had more saved.

Amazing how cheap you can find some of those 12 valve 5.9's, too. There's one on Houston CL right now supposedly 125K miles, running great, complete truck, for a grand - of course, bad transmission. They already pulled the trans so, might be a little tough to tell if the engine is really good. http://houston.craigslist.org/cto/1010296732.html

Richard