I just turned over 20K on the 'new' engine, and it's been right at 2 years now since the head gasket blew starting this whole project. The whole rig has been running great, no issues at all now. I do have a slight coolant leak (a few drops on the ground periodically), but it appears to be either the radiator or lower radiator hose. I can't see where it's coming from, even with removing the fan shroud and the lower skid plate. It hasn't gotten worse, so I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to it. I fear the next step would be to pull the radiator, and I just haven't been concerned enough to do that just yet.

I quit keeping track of my fuel mileage; I discovered my odometer is not recording mileage correctly. The speedometer is spot on, but when I check the odometer with my GPS app, it's showing a bit slow/behind. The trip odometer quit years ago, so after 395K miles, I guess it's not hard to believe that the main odometer would be a bit worn out by now as well.

The engine starts immediately, in any weather, with very little smoke at startup. I've been on quite a few camping trips now, and she loves to pull hard, and never even gets close to being hot when towing. The old engine ran hot all the time when towing, and I always had to keep one eye glued to the temp gauge. Now I can tow as hard as I want, and not worry one bit. I still plan to swap to 4:10 gears one of these days in order to improve towing performance.

The HX35 turbo works great, but there is quite a bit of turbo lag. The low-stall torque converter combined with 3.42 gears and 33" tires means that I have a lot of black smoke when pulling away from a stop when towing my camper. It takes a bit longer to spool up than the original GM4 I was using before, but the cooler running engine and less backpressure is really worth the trade off. Once it spools up, though, the smoke clears away and she pulls hard. I can barely detect any smoke at all, even at full throttle, so she's burning the fuel quite well at that point. Unless I really push it, boost stays around 10-13 psi on hard pulls. Once in a while it will climb to 15 psi if I really keep my foot in it, but generally that's not needed.

I feel very confident in this rig now, and wouldn't hesitate to jump in and drive to anywhere in the country. I love driving an old school diesel rig, and love getting comments at fuel stations; a majority of folks are surprised to find out that this is, in fact, a factory diesel.

Casey