Friday, Mar 18, 2005 at 18:33
tigertough12,
To answer your first question, I am certainly no expert, but I have over the years developed some mechanical knowledge, and to my knowledge you can't over stress an engine (particularly a diesel) by overloading it. Overloading a motor will cause excessive heat which will in turn stress the motor, but if heat can be controlled there is no stress. Also over fuelling or over boosting a turbo diesel will cause excessive stress, but what I was referring to in my statement was mainly over revving. You can load an engine till it stalls with no adverse results, in fact I've seen it done on a dyno. It’s a different story with a petrol motor because it will cause detonation which will do damage, but not a diesel.
In my honest opinion, fitting a Dtronic will not do any harm provided that the car is driven in the way that it was intended to be for example kept within its rev range and not over boosted. The 3.0L Nissan diesel has no heating issues, so a fair bit of load on the motor should be achievable without any problems. Certainly driving a car hard will shorten its engines life and if you drive any car on the rev limiter, you won't have it for long and I think the same goes for the 3.0L Nissan, but with the dtronic, the extra torque means you don't have to rev the motor to get going. I rarely get over 3,000rpm in
mine, even towing up hills.
All I have ever learnt about fine tuning engines, is simply burning the fuel and air that you have as completely as possible to make them run more efficiently, which is another reason I don’t think the Dtronic is harmful, because it doesn’t make your engine use more fuel.
I think the other issue to consider here is that of exhaust gas temperatures and combustion chamber temperatures which is something that is irrespective of water temperature, but perhaps more detrimental to over stressing a diesel engine, and I’m sure all 3.0L Nissan owners would be hoping that Nissan have finally got that one right.
As for your second question, I would imagine why, in their wisdom, Nissan didn’t produce the cab chassis in a 3.0L because the low down torque of the 4.2 made it more suitable, and after all, they do promote the 4.2 as their workhorse motor, so it stands to reason that they would use it in their workhorse vehicle. The 3.0L auto doesn’t have the turbo lag problems of the manual, but the auto doesn’t have the load rating either, which would make it unsuitable for the ute.
Why don’t they offer the 4.2 wagon in auto? Because I’m sure there would be a market for it, but perhaps they don’t sell enough 4.2’s worldwide to warrant the production of an auto.
Chaz
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