Yes gentlemen, I must now divulge that there is a wave moving over our happy little community. Since before recorded enthusiasm for our beloved motorhome it’s been gas based. Our 403 and 455 Olds power plants were at the top of their game and our motorhomes prospered because of it. Still today, for the GMC enthusiast, we have take our petroleum fired furnaces to their inevitable evolution. Whenever we find limitations though, it’s always human nature to want more Heck, that’s the American way… thicker steaks, fatter tires and more power! You know what I mean, size and power matter and hey I’m on board with that too!
“Times, they are a changn’…” and with time changing times, energy consumption, efficiency, maintenance, obsolesence and attitudes are also changing. We absolutely know that going faster uses more fuel… that aerodynamic drag is the foe we face and there are good and bad about your energy source. We didn’t care about that before, push the pedal on the right harder…. it’l go…
Then came in our “savior”, the computer age. And yep, they don’t put a hoodlatch on some cars today for your protection and the fact that there’s nothing under there you can do anything about. Not true of course but you know a new Mercedes does not have an oil dip stick…
The innovators of all this told us the car will fix itself one day…. yes but before it tells you it has a dirty diaper maybe but you can’t do anything about it. Someone else will need to sergically remove it!!!!! Maybe an off color analogy but it’s true… those poineers were good to their word but we never linked that with not being able to work on our own vehicles and with RV labor at over $100 per hour… man these things have become a real investment. I think those up on high figure if you’re nuts enough to buy one of these you are nuts enough to spend big bucks for them.
Now wait, I’m not saying the industry is ripping you off… no thats not it, they are building things that may or may not be what the public wants but are forced to buy. There are some pretty nice machines coming out of the RV industry but the problem is the total cost of owning, maintaining and using an RV is limiting it’s participants. No easy answer for this, for the meantime and since there probably is less we can do about this disparagy is we seek alternative ways to spend our RV dollars. This is where the Co-op here has been directing efforts for a very long time.
Bet you thought I got lost in a tangent…. Nope, so to this end and to seeking to update our GMC motorhome for quality use well into the future… or at least for another 10 years…. Comes the rise of the TurboDiesel GMC motorhome.
The evolution of this idea has been a long time coming and has gone through many revisions and designs. Our front wheel drive train severly limits the swapping of power plants, there are many more factors involved than with a rear wheel drive vehicle. There are 2 ways to engineer something as involved as this… you can throw a team of engineers, fabricators and some guy with a shaggy white beard… go through the accepted path of engineering discovery, validation and testing….or…. years of really smart guys in the back yard garage lubricating their brains with maybe a frothy beverage and put one together, fix it, scrap it and try again until something works. What can I say, one way takes cubic dollars and the other way takes sheer determination, the mud, the blood and some beer!
We have a unique situation, our home grown mechanical GMC guru in the name of Manny T., and a huge multinational company with rights of design, engineering and manufacture have teamed up and produced a GM 6.5 turbodiesel option we have up to not not had. A NEW metal industrialized 6.5 turbodiesel motor that can adapt to our GMC. No electronics, mechanical injection, baseline spec and tuning means you can do whatever you want to beef it up, off shelf late model replacement parts means it can be fixed by any competant diesel mechanic on the road. Finally, we have an option to use a new motor suited for pulling our GMC in todays society. Awesome….
Upcoming we will be doing the documentation of installation on 2 project getting this new turbo diesel drive train. AND, you will be able to watch right here! Lemme say it again…. awesome!…
The “perfect product” if there is such a thing has to have 3 things
o good quality (it’s gotta work as good as you thought it’s supposed to)
o you can have it now (instant gratification)
o and it’s cheaper than you thought (it’s all relative)
Looking at that, the bean counters will only allow you to have 2 and will hold the 3rd one out to make the big bucks. Think about it… if you want quality work and you want it now it will cost you… Would take so much labor and so many parts to do something that way it would of course cost more. With this… new turbo diesel swap into a 30+ year old GMC motorhome, it’s gonna have to be a back to basics approach.
The motorhome originally had it’s drive train assembled then served up into the body. This way all details could be attended to without the body in the way. 
So that’s what we’re gonna do, we will build up a complete drive train on the frame then swap frame clips. This way the entire drave train can be carefully put together as it originally was but now with the new GM 6.5 turbo diesel motor. This is what we need… ALL NEW and all new it will be…
Step 1 then will be to procure a suitable frame, we pulled 2 from our frame coral 
I picked the one with the superduty cow catcher on the front. This will forever be the Bull diesel installation. 
Don’t know what the “12” originally scribbled in greasemarker when the fram was manufactured.. makes little difference to me…. trust me it’s not #12…
In perperation for Manny arriving soon with 2 motor kits under his arms, we need to build up this first frame. This is where we are, I need to process pics of the frame restoration. Lets do that tomorrow. Work at the shop progresses, I’ll report on that too tomorrow. Hope you see how inportant this new motor project is to the future viability of our GMC. Stay tuned and follow this one… it should be good…
