Peninsular Possible Engine Issue

[pahter]

I am about to close on a 1998 Albin 28 TE. After reading a number of post about possible issues with Peninsular engines from 1997 to 1999 one of the member responded to my question on how to determine if the one I am looking to buy may be an issue. Below is that contact and then the respond I received from Peninsular.

Jeremyvmd wrote:

The issue with a small number of motors was gm miss drilling the blocks. If you get the block number and call peninsular they will be happy to tell you if its in the possibly affected group. Not all were bad and it's hard to predict which will have issues...
Congrats on your upcoming purchase!

My email sent to Peninsular:
The seller took pics of the serial numbers and I emailed them to Peninsular. 15 minutes after I sent the email Mitch responded (see below) so I am moving forward. I am not sure how to put this out there for others who may have the same question at some point. Thanks

Reply from Peninsular
Motor was produced in July 1999 and was set up to be a 300hp engine. The problem engines were 1998 engines were GM was using a 8mm oil squirter in 1999 they switched to a 6mm oil squirter which took care of the problem.

Thank you to all which have posted information on this engine

Thanks,
Mitch
Peninsular Engines, Inc.

[kerrye]

GM had various problems with the 6.5 diesel over the years. It wasn't just the 1998. For instance, I had a 1993 and the block cracked at about 100k miles. They had problems with heads cracking and block failures on the rear pistons. Some years were more crack prone than others. 1998 is one of those years. The best blocks are those produced by International once GM stopped production. It's called an Optimizer block and is evidenced by the two triangle International symbol in the valley. Some people call that symbol a diamond. There's a version produced now called a P400 which has a girdle, making it the most robust 6.5 ever produced. Here's a good place to learn a lot about the 6.5 engine. http://www.dieselplace.com/forum/63-gm- ... el-engine/