The existence of the Chevy II four cylinder engine was questionable from the get-go. I can’t find production stats for 1962, but in 1963, a grand total of 3,770 cheap-skates ponied up for the four, a little over 1% of the total. And how many of those went government and utility fleets? It makes me wonder if some of our commenters’ childhood memories of Chevy II fours might have lost a couple of cylinders along the way? But fear not: if you have a Chevy II four, and its engine is feeling a bit feeble and worn out, GM still makes replacements. And it’s a lot more powerful than the original, like twice as much so.
The Vortec 3.0 now belts out 140 net hp at a vibratory 4800rpm; the original 153 made 90 gross hp, about 70-75 net hp. It’s been bored and stroked to 181 cubic inches, and is offered as a marine or industrial engine. Mercury has been offering a Mercruiser 3.0 for decades, using the raw engines from GM. And here it is, in GM’s 2013 catalog, the modern descendant of the Chevy II four.
Please note: this is not related to the Pontiac “Iron Duke” or subsequent “Tech 4” engines. It does gets a bit confusing, given how similar they are. This is a genuine Hecho en Mexico Chevy, even if it can’t be called that anymore.
This made my day. I love finding out that long gone tech is still in existence. Even if I can’t imagine ever wanting one myself.:)
GM uses the same technology in their cars. Why are you surprised?
Oh you…..you’re funny when you’re stupid…..
If you’re referring to pushrods, Bentley uses them too….
BIL’s ’04 5.3 Chevy van still going strong with over 350,000 miles on it. Still sounds amazingly quiet.
And it only puts out as much power as, er, some old muscle cars. 295 net equates to 320-330 gross HP back-in-the-day.
Bought used with 150,000 on it, he just changed the plugs and wires…at 350,000 miles. He thinks it’s possible the original plugs were still in there.
Gimme GM’s pushrods any day of the week over exotic – but expensive to maintain – technology from everyone else.
Got no arguments with a good old pushrod. Compact packaging and good deep down torque for the given displacement. If an engine makes peak torque at 5,000 rpm it better be a plateau starting at about 1,500 rpm or I’m not going to be able to use all that power.
There you go. I couldn’t believe the shape of the original plugs in my ’89 305 TBI engine at 120K. It will outlive me no doubt. It’s at 182K now with zero issues aside from a $6 TBI gasket and a few leaky water pumps.
250K is cake for a reasonably maintained fuel injected SBC. Love them.
My parents used to have a 1991 or ’92 Bayliner runabout with Mercruiser I/O and a GM 3.0L mill. It wasn’t called a “Vortec” at the time, but could have been the same block. It had decent power and never gave us any trouble for the many years that we owned it.
It is kind of sad that after all of the money GM has invested in four cylinder engines over the last 40 years, the one still out there giving cheap, durable, reliable service is the one that came out in 1962 as a sawn-off Chevy 6.
It’s kind of a shame that Chrysler didn’t take the same route and lop two cylinders off the slant 6 when it needed some four cylinder engines in the 80s. 2/3 of a 198 slant six would have come in at about 2.2 L, and would probably have been a better engine than what we got in the K cars.
Come on JPC, the guy who engineered the 2.2 also worked on the engineering of the Slant 6! Being a bit of a Mopar enthusiast I’m shocked you didn’t know that. 😛
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_2.2_%26_2.5_engine
JP, I’ve read (probably on allpar) that a four cylinder version of the slant six was tried, but it wasn’t acceptable in multiple areas such as power output, smoothness and fuel economy.
Now I’m wondering if Chrysler ever experimented with slicing a Hemi in half to make a 4 cyl to see if they could pull an “Iron Duke” like GM did.
Or how about creating a V4 derived from the Hemi or the small-block Chevy?
That sounds like a really amusingly bad idea…
SBC based V4s are used in off-roaders and Midgets.
A 90 degree V4? Feel the power! 🙂
The Chevy six was a seven main bearing design. The slant six was four bearing for compactness. I dont think lopping off two cylinders would have been as successful an idea.
If we’re going to follow your line of thought, let’s do a proper job of it; let’s figure out what ⅔ of the 198 Slant-6’s output would have been. The 198 was discontinued after 1974, so first we need to figure out what the 198 would have put out in the relevant years. Let’s extrapolate from the data we have. The 1974 198 and 225 put out 95 and 105 hp, respectively, a ratio of 0.9047. The first K-cars came in 1981, when the 225 was putting out 85 or 90 hp depending on configuration, so let’s take the average and call it 87½. Multiply that by our 0.9047: a 1981-spec 198 would have produced 79 hp, and a four-cylinder version of it would have made less than 53 whole, entire horsepowers.
The real-life 1981 2.2 produced 84 horsepower—over 59 per cent more than your 2/3-of-a-198 idea. How do you imagine a chopped-off Slant-4 engine would have been ‘probably better’ than the 2.2? Please be specific, because I’m just not seeing it.
I’m surely one of the world’s loudest cheerleaders for the Slant-6, but it was severely obsolete by the time the K-car era came round. There was a lot of Slant-6 soundness baked into the 2.2 motor, but the engineers wisely acted as though they were designing an engine for the 1980s, not pining through rosy glasses for the good ol’ days of the 1960s.
It still looks like a mirror image GMH Starfire 4 to me starter is on the opposite side, dizzy and fuel pump are transposed, but its easy to see where GMH got its inspiration from. No more unreliable Opel hicam 4 bangers we”ll build our own from existing parts pretty much what they did earlier to produce a local V8 with much better results.
I like that this thing exists. But if I where building a four cylinder chevy II. I thnk I would start with a 2.0 ecotec maby a turbo charged version out of a last chance cobalt cobalt. 260 hp and 260ft/lbs should wake up a II nicely and deliver decent mpg as well.
Well if you got the turbo ecotec out of a Saturn Sky or a Pontiac Solstice you’d already have one designed for RWD for your Chevy II. That is certainly the route I’d go before I messed with a FWD Cobalt design.
For automotive use, I have to say that the idea of a 2,967 cc inline-four of shall we say venerable architecture and no balance shafts sounds like a good argument for finding a six-cylinder Chevy II instead.
AUWM, that’s no fun. 😉 You need to read some Hot Rod Magazines and fantasize about swapping Hemi V8s, SBC, and Ford 5.0s into cars that never had ’em! 😛
Well, surely nobody needs me to suggest putting a V-8 in a Chevy II, whether it originally had one or not, and a decent V-8 installation would probably mitigate by objection to the 3-liter four, which has to do with second-order vibration. (Porsche managed to deal with that pretty well on the 968, but that was with balance shafts, of which this thing is innocent.)
My feeling is, “If you’re not going to just drop a V-8 in it, a six sounds a lot less painful.”
My late father in law had one in one of his boats back in the eighties. The only one I ever saw in a car was when I was young. It was in a new a Nova cheepie two door sedan that a guy down the street had. I remember him telling me that these engines were “scarce as hens teeth”
Hmm… The GM branch in Brazil used the 153 engine for its Chevrolet Opala (a 1965 Opel Commodore clone) from 69 to 73. Then it was re-worked as the 151 (4.00X3.50) and kept going in the automotive line until 1992; survived another ten years as an industrial/marine equipment. Could it be the same engine? AGB
I’d love to see a TBI-fed one of these in a green or blue ’68-’72 Nova with overdriven transmission, everything else close to original and absolutely no SS fakery. What a cool DD it would be.
With this off the shelf engine and better rustproofing, the Vega could have been one of the greats.
I’m also happy that (2/3rds of) the venerable Stovebolt Six is still in production – I had a 216 cid in my 1941 Chevy Special Deluxe, my now-wife’s 1975 Nova had the 250 cid, and a neighbor’s boat had the Mercury 4-cylinder from the early 1990s.
This would probably make an excellent sprint car engine as well (not sure what they are running these days, but my friend had a straight-6-powered one back in the 1990s).
I totally agree on the 250 I6 engines, I had one in my ’74 Nova 4 door, and it was a decent powerhouse, just not a performance motor in the least, but more than adequate for a daily driver.
Mine was bolted up to the 3spd autobox as by ’74 at the latest, all Novas got the 3spd autobox as the standard autobox option.
Nearly all sprint cars run some type of SBC; some series permit engines up to 410 CID while others have a 360 CID max. The four banger could be used in midget racing, about the only requirement is that the engine be no more than six cylinders and be normally aspirated. A typical midget racer would have 325-350 horsepower (sprint cars have 800+); USAC has a minimum weight requirement of 900 pounds. For the past several years USAC has also run a spec motor class with engines based on the Ford Focus four banger; these typically have around 180 hp and are all acquired from the same source. Apparently these engines are more durable (less highly stressed) and this was done to try and reduce costs for the race teams.
the 216 line of engine ended with the 235 in chev cars and 261 intrucks in 61 0r 62
when the 194, 230 and 292 and later 250 and the 4 was part of this design
i had a 60 235 and a 65 230 in conventional 1/2 ton panel trucks
60 was better on gas but was worn out and burned a quart every few days
the 65 a little more gas but it never stranded me until many years when the fuel tank corroded and clogged the system would love to get another one restored but hard to find without being a basket case so easy to do almost any repair and was fixable on the road 99% of the time now its a tow 99%
I have seen these motors being used in boats for many years and had always heard them to be a good if not overly powerful choice for one. I had also known of their origins as a GM motor but never actually knew what they had originally been used for. Learning things like this is what makes me like this site.
“It makes me wonder if some of our commenters’ childhood memories of Chevy II fours might have lost a couple of cylinders along the way?”
Okay, full disclosure: I never saw my 5th grade teacher’s Chevy II Nova with the hood up, so maybe it didn’t actually have a 4-cylinder engine.
However… I can’t imagine why he’d lie about something like that.
One small correction, Paul. Mercury Marine does indeed still buy the basic longblock from GM. They DID build their own 4 banger, the 224/3.7L, which had an aluminum open deck block and was topped by a iron 460 Ford head. Introduced in ’76, was produced until ’89. It is the only inboard/sterndrive engine Mercury used that was never seen in a car. Or a forklift. And it drives me nuts every time someone calls these Iron Dukes. You didn’t, but I hear it from boat owners all the time! GM also has a version of that head which is machined for, and comes with multi-port fuel injectors and fuel rail. The Chevy II four banger has entered the digital age!
Thanks; I’ve amended the text. I had some doubts about that info when I read it; didn’t seem likely.
The engine this was derived from (or so I hear) was in two of my favorite cars. A 68 Nova and a 67 Chevelle. Considering it’s lineage I think it might be hard to go wrong. I think I prefer the 230 to just about anything GM was putting out in the early sixties. At any rate, it was the best I owned. Pushrods worked ok for me.
Personally the vehicle I would like to have seen it in would be an early S10. The 4.3 that my truck has is stone axe reliable. I’m not sure their four has the same reputation but guess it doesn’t matter. Can’t buy a new S10 anyway.
I wish the 4 cylinder “Cavalier” engine in my S10 would be as tough as the 4.3, but I haven’t seen that yet. I guess I’m going to find out since I can’t afford a replacement, and, as you say they don’t make the S10 anymore.
I guess it depends… That Cavalier motor (2.2 OHV) is an Opel design, tough as nails when treated to a reasonable maintenance regime.
I’ve got one in a 97 Cavalier (of all things!) with 265K miles, still going strong. Of course, being in rust country, the body will fall off before the motor gives out…
George: The 2.2 is not an Opel design; it’s pure Chevy. Did you miss this? https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/is-wiki-wrong-on-the-gm-122-engine-are-these-two-engines-related/
My Mother’s 95 Cavalier had the head gasket fail at 50K miles, then the cylinder head cracked at 65K. My 94 S10 had the head gasket fail at 52K, then I bought my 2001 model. So far so good. Have you been able to thwart the head gasket failures with regular coolant replacement? I hope so; I’m hoping that will work for me as well.
My old 98 Cavalier had over 230K on it and the engine ran great when I had to get rid of it because I hit a pothole which ruined the transmission. That car was tough. I didn’t take great care of it, either.
As a Westcoast boy, I will, as usual, take the opposite view. I have spent a lot of time around boats, since I grew up on an island. This motor is not intended for cars but it is excellent for boats. For a boat, what you want is reliability and the ability to sustain long-term loads. There are loads of these things powering boats all over the Western Hemisphere. You can fit them out with a gravity tank and 1 bbl carb or get a modern FI and engine management system.
These motors are well known in the boating community for their toughness, durability and lower initial cost. They are one of the biggest sellers for Mercury Marine:
http://www.mercurymarine.com/engines/mercruiser/sterndrives/3.0/
Get a load of the weight of the thing, at 1040 lbs, it’s like 260 lbs heavier than the 4.3 V-6!
I was in the marine industry and was in the plant in Mexico (Teluca I think) that builds these over 10 yrs ago.
They were also building the 292 I6 for UPS and the split seal SBC for service replacement. Don’t know if that is still the case. High quality low cost engine, more applicable for marine and commercial use today.
I used to work on these a lot when I wrenched on boats for a living. They are reliable and dead simple to work on. (thou mercury used to make it so you had to pull the front motor mount to change the alternator belt) much simpler than the 3,7 half a 460 thing with “thunderbolt” ignition. But despite this I would never own one. They vibrate like hell are noisy and just far less engine than the 4.3 when you want to get on plane. But than again I can fix it myself so I don’t really worry about a little added maintenance.
The Mercury 3.7L never got Thunderbolt electronic ignition. It retained points its entire production run.
Doh, it’s been a while I was actually thinking of the outboard like under flywheel charging system, I haven’t worked on one of those in a decade all I could remember was changing stators under the bilge water rusted flywheel
The flywheel alternator served as an engine dampener I replace them with conventional belt driven alternators and a harmonic dampener.
I dont suppose they used this engine (at 181ci) in passenger cars and I cant think of a gaspline 4cyl larger than the Porsche, but Mitsubishi and Nissan have 3.2L diesel 4cyls. A big 4cyl is ideal as a working engine I think, very easy to service with only one cylinder head especially in a transverse installation.
Of course there are balance shafts to help but I used to know a guy who raced a twin-Webered Mitsu 2.6 with the balance shafts removed that he would turn to 7000rpm+ with no issues. Well except when the transplanted Nissan H190 diff failed and locked solid which lead to the gearbox input shaft breaking too – a pretty stout engine!
Big automotive four poppers from the ’60s:
Pontiac “Half-of-a-389” “Tempest” Slant Four of 194 cubes.
International “Half-of-a-304” and “Half-of-a-392” “Scout” Slant Fours of 152 and 196 cubes.
the 153CID is not a legend only motor. I currently have 5 of those engines, one in a 1963 Chevy ll. Great engine.
This a nice little motor with a nice hp range for t buckets hot rods,small rear wheel drive cars looking for good mpgs.or for short track racing using v8 parts.The thing about it is. You only get this engine in boats or industrial forklift.so if I got the boat motor 140 hp. And added the industrial exhaust and intake manifold system I could put this in a car.this engine bolts a small block bellhousing for gm trans.
1. The “Iron Duke” is ABSOLUTELY a development of the Chevy II four-popper. You want to stroke an early Iron Duke, you drop a Chevy II crankshaft into it. Instant quarter-inch more stroke. Bearing sizes and spacing are identical. Of course, you need special pistons and such to use the Chevy II crank in the “Pontiac” block. The early Iron Duke uses the same timing gear system as the Chevy II (and the Chevy six-popper it’s derived from.) As the development of the Duke progressed, it became further and further removed from it’s 151 Chevy II heritage. Aside from bore-and-stroke changes, the Duke got a crossflow head fairly early-on.
2. Development of this line of engines continued. There are approximately 120 variations–some minor changes, lots of major changes–over the years. BEWARE that some castings can be machined differently. I have a friend with a Duke in an S-10. He replaced the cylinder head. Got a replacement head with the same casting number. The thing would pop head gaskets every time he took it on the highway. Turns out the “new” head had a cooling passage machined in a different spot than the original head, and the passage no longer lined-up with the hole in the head gasket. Same casting number–different application and part number.
3. Pontiac claimed credit for the “Iron Duke”, but it was being produced and sold in Brazil years before Pontiac stuffed the thing into an “American” car. Did Pontiac develop the “Iron Duke”, or was the work really done by GM of Brasil?
For confirmation and detailed information, please see Automotive Rebuilder magazine, November 1986, and September 1991 issues.
The Iron Duke/Tech 4 in all it’s forms as produced by GM were pieces of crap, but GM sold a mountain of them. They can be turned into a half-assed engine (surprisingly adequate power but rough as a cob) with some attention to detail, proper camshaft selection, sufficiently calibrated carburation/injection, and lots of prayer.
I have used both the Mercruiser (chevy) 153 2.5 L and the aluminum mercruiser 3.7L engine (adapted) in the same street rod. There is no comparison in power and torque as the 3.7 is amazing in a 1800 lb car. The smaller 2.7 is reliable but uninspiring. The 3.7 is physically much larger…A mechanic for a race car running a 3.0 variant of a 2.5 panicked when he saw my 3.7 and tried to get me disqualified.
the smaller engine was a 2.5 not a 2.7 (mistyped)
Replacement injectors for the GM 3.0L LW6 style ? Having a hard time finding them.
I’m having trouble figuring out how they’re able to give reliable horsepower and torque figures for an engine with no induction or exhaust system. That matters a lot to those ratings, no?
In at least two places it says “actual power may vary depending on OEM application and calibration”.
This is common with crate engines, and industrial engines. User supplies them. The ratings given indicate the engine’s potential.
The Mercruiser 3.0 stern drive is rated at 135 hp, with fuel injection.
The 140 hp rating presumably is the maximum the engine is capable of with optimized induction and exhaust. Like all gasoline engines, its power potential is almost totally dependent on the breathing ability of the head and the camshaft specs. You can’t make it produce more power than that by putting on a larger carb, for instance. But you can make it produce less, which might be desirable for certain industrial applications.
It’s a fair bit different with industrial/marine engines than with car engines, given emission regulations, driveability issues, power accessories, and a torque curve optimized for the application.
I rebuilt a Mercruiser 120 engine(same engine as the 140 but no crossflow head). Parts are available in abundance and it ran reliably but it felt like it had 70 horsepower. It is an adequate engine to just putt along in if that is enough for you.