Hi Forum. My name is Shane from Orlando and had a problem. it was the duramax motor in my 2005 Kodiak. The truck is a BEAST. the trans is a dream too. I bought the truck new in 2006, flew up to NC and drove it back home. I was stoked because although I had owned 6 or 7 diesels in the past, I had never bought one new. I knew I would know the maintenance history and work history, and this would be a good motor. Wrong. It started off fine, 20k miles in i lost my first water pump. The General was cool though, they towed it and gave me a free rental truck. They did this for the first 3 water pumps then that particular dealer told me they would no longer work on this truck and I needed to take it to the commercial duty dealer. So thats what i did. And every time, I got more and more vocal about this being a motor built at 4:55 on a friday, please take it out and give me a new one. Nope. the short version is, 8 water pumps, 1 EGR cooler, a VVT turbo and some things i'm surely forgetting and neglect from the dealers drove me to remove this cancerous motor from this truck and build a 6bt to replace it.
I sourced a 12 valve stock 6bt out of a wrecked F800 for $1500. I tore it down and sent the block and head out for machining where i was informed that the head was cracked, so I bought a new head. there was a rust pit in one of the cylinder walls, so the block was machined .005 over and a rebuild kit was purchased.
I took all of this booty back to my shop and have been steady putting it together in the meantime. This gave me plenty of time to figure out how much power I wanted to make and how i was gonna get it. I already had a beast of an injector pump, the Bosch P7100, and coming from the application it was already pretty manly. I had the pump rebuilt and fitted with a GSK4K governor kit that will allow this motor to spin to 4k rpm. I bought a Banks Twin Ram intake to replace the poor flowing stock one, a Banks Quick Turbo and Big Head wastegate actuator and some marine injectors. And an Airdog2 for fuel delivery, along with ARP head studs. Shooting for power in the 500 range.
The Allison isn't built for more than 350 horse. Surprisingly to me, the torque limit is 750 ft lbs too, so a build of the tranny was necessitated. I went with a Suncoast Gmax5 and Suncoast 1057 touque converter. and thats pretty much the stage I'm at right now. I have a few more little things on the motor to button up, paint it and then build some motor mounts and make it work. I learned everything I needed to know about the 6bt from this site, i learned what mods you guys like, what works well and the things that maybe i don't need to pay much attention to.
If you would like to follow my build from this point, it's here
http://www.dieselplace.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=418196

 

thats awesome man cant wait to see it wen shes done..did you do the kdp before u put the front cover back on?

 

my cover was actually cracked from the PO, they had pried on it and broken a chunk out, so I bought a new one that has been updated. very nice!

 

oh i see well thats great