When Dodge started jamming in six-cylinder Cummins diesel engines into Ram pickup trucks, they figured out the first step in revitalizing a lineup that hadn’t seen a freshening since 1981 and a clean-sheet design since 1972: torque by the boatload. It wasn’t the first time any of the Big Three had used diesels…GM had been busy with the 6.2L and 6.5L units and Ford had been working with International Harvester’s IDI engines since 1982, and Dodge had even flirted with Nissan’s 6DR5 six-cylinder in 1978 and Perkins a decade or so before that. But the Cummins was a winner from the word “go”, and even to this day you can still find a an old first-gen Ram that farm kids and diesel freaks will pay five figures for because of just that engine alone. Even unmodified in any manner, the 6BT is a beast of a work engine and it’s popularity the world over is legendary.
The running joke about a Cummins is that they’ll last longer than the truck they’re plopped into, and in the case of the sad-sack dually Ram you’ll see here, that’s probably true. If the truck is done, it’s time to get the engine into a new home, and that’s where this video starts…not with a good engine, but with a Komatsu bulldozer with one seriously injured engine. Komatsus like this one used an offshoot form of the 6BT and this one spent some time knocking a hole in the block while turning the piston into craft glitter. One dead player engine in a useful piece of equipment, and one seriously effed truck with a solid engine just sitting there. Oh, and just for some icing on the cake, there’s another YouTuber cross-up happening on this project!
Not sure which Dozer they are putting the Cummins into, but that engine was used in Case tractors for years.
That was my first thought too. The B series engines were originally meant for applications just like this, there was a relationship between Case and Cummins during the design of these engines and the years following. Cummins was actually the one that did the jamming of their engine into the Dodge trucks. Cummins was pushing for more sales and that was part of the deal was that Cummins did most of the adaptation engineering for putting their engine into Dodge trucks (Chrysler was very broke at this time). Also, the Dodge full size trucks had seen quite a bit of freshening in 1985, mostly in the mechanical realm.
Cummins got the 6B design from white tractor.
It was originally in their tractors.
The ones they built before selling to Cummins that are in tractors were great engines.
After the sell, the tractor engines had the Cummins tag on them