"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
12/18/2015 at 18:09 • Filed to: Detroit Diesel, Two stroke, Bedford
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"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
12/18/2015 at 18:09 • Filed to: Detroit Diesel, Two stroke, Bedford | 1
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This idea, an American two stroke diesel in a Bedford truck, chosen for the sole reason that both were GM products.
It wasn’t a good idea.
RallyWrench
> Cé hé sin
12/18/2015 at 18:57 |
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I was under the impression that the 8-71 was a popular and well regarded engine. What was the issue?
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Cé hé sin
> RallyWrench
12/19/2015 at 05:29 |
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It was popular in America. Elsewhere, not so much. Drivers didn’t like having to rev the engine to within an inch of its life to extract any power from it and owners didn’t like the fuel bills. Bedford started offering it in 1982 and closed the doors in 1986, not because of the two strokes but because GM refused to invest and allowed the civilian market to wither away. They lost a big contract from the UK Ministry of Defence, allegedly because Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t give it to an American owned company, and without civilian sales couldn’t carry on.
Interestingly GM wanted to buy Landrover at about the same time but weren’t allowed for the same reasons.
I recall that a bus operator here in Ireland bought a batch of two stroke buses in the 1980s, because they were thought to be reliable and GM were almost giving them away. In the event it wasn’t an experiment they repeated. They weren’t as reliable as predicted and tended to leak oil from every pore. They also came attached to terrible three speed Allison gearboxes (they haven’t used them again either!) which used to shed ATF at about the same rate as the engine shed oil and used to then lose top gear. They’ve used DAF, Volvo and Scania engines ever since with ZF gearboxes.
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RallyWrench
> Cé hé sin
12/19/2015 at 12:02 |
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Interesting, thanks for the information.
jimz
> Cé hé sin
12/21/2015 at 10:41 |
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couldn’t have been any worse than the Commer Knocker.
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Cé hé sin
> jimz
12/21/2015 at 11:46 |
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It may have been. The Commer engine was in production for a long time and was quite popular. It was supposed to be economical by the standards of the day although it did have its issues, like filling itself with carbon and occasionally self destructing.