Maybe a converted big block bell housing? Id say it had to be....
The bellhousing is the weird part for sure. I had that truck apart, bell was un modified, aluminum and diesel bell pattern.mechanical linkage with no ears for the slave on the bellhousing.
I'm going to say it's from a different application then, like some sort of big IH truck......who knows.....Big Foot probably put it in deep in the woods of the PNW....
I saw one myself. It was being stripped out in a guy's driveway. This is the one that I though was a 1983 but I may be wrong.
That is strange. Maybe it was an early test vehicle that got away from the factory?
It's possible. As far as I know, the truck engines were the only 3.8s without CFI. All of the car 3.8s had aluminum heads, which doesn't say much since I've probably only seen 5 or 6. If the truck engines had cast heads, then they could have been different. Kind of like the GM 3.8s from the early/mid 80s were dogs as far as I'm concerned, but the GM 3800s were pretty good engines. No that doesn't include the 1986 Buick Grand National since it was a one of a kind car.
I said this because I met a guy who swore that he saw a 1993 with a 7.3 PSD in it. He said that it was all street legal, driven and everything. It could happen.
It happens, not very often, but it does happen. Last year I was at one of our wholesale distributors up in Edmonton, Alberta of all places. He has a couple of V8 diesels sitting on a pallet, and asks us if we know what they are. Start looking them over, GM casting numbers and marks, but obviously the engines are built from prototype or pre-production parts. Did a little research, called some of our contacts at GM, and found out that they were 4.5L Duramax's. The link below has a bit of history on this canceled engine program. GM built enough of these engines to conduct durability, emissions, and other pre-production testing, but canceled the program before production could be started. GM should have destroyed all of the test engines, and hence, these engines should have never made it out into the wild. Granted, they were just fancy boat anchors without the ECU / Wiring harness, but there they sat, up in Northern Alberta, nearly 20 years after GM canceled the program.
I always thought it must have been some pre production test truck as well.
I also remember that we had a 7.3PSD short block in our shop. It also must have been pre production because all of the threads were SAE instead of metric.
