An invitation to SlantSixDan and other mopar historians; can anyone provide proof that the slant engine was manufactured in Australia?

You may want to contribute to the discussion here;
http://moparmarketforum.com/phpBB/viewt ... 469#119469

Thanks.

I get the sense from the Moparmarket thread that the author of the article being called into question (i.e., the one who cites a "very knowledgeable source" claiming slant-6s weren't made in Australia) is upset that people are looking askance at what might well be an article researched not quite as carefully as it ought to have been...or perhaps at an author who couldn't or didn't find answers to his questions, and so wrote down as fact whatever he thought sounded plausible. Not too shocking; it happens every day in the publishing industry, but assertions do not become fact simply because they appear in print under a byline. That said, it's now 2007, Chrysler Australia Ltd ceased to exist twenty-six years ago, and there are some details we will likely never know for 100% certain.

"Proof"? Well, it's thoroughly documented that Chrysler Australia Ltd's Lonsdale Engine Plant began operations in 1967, producing (i.e., casting and assembling) slant-6 engines for Australian-production Valiants and Dodges. I have a couple of pieces of literature produced by Chrysler Australia Ltd ("Chrysler Chronicle") with photos of the new plant and details of what exactly was being made there: slant-6 engines, primarily, for the first few years. However, these materials are many miles away from me now and for the foreseeable future, and are therefore not readily accessible.

Sadly, the recollections of people who worked at various Chrysler Australia vehicle assembly plants cannot be taken as authoritative regarding where the engines came from. We are talking here about not especially publicised corporate operations that took place forty years ago, and most of us just don't have a memory as sharp as we think it is for events that happened four months ago, let alone four decades. I love reading retrospective interviews with yesteryear's vehicle assemblers and engineers, but most of them contain quite a lot of errors. Engine displacement errors, vehicle model and year errors, option availability errors, specification errors...not because any of these people is trying to mislead anyone, but because it's just not the sort of thing that most people are equipped to remember in picayune detail so many years after the fact, especially since the claim in question is thirdhand via the son of an individual whose job description as a vehicle assembler didn't include knowing where the engines came from.

Yes, slant-6 engines for the Australian market came from North America for the first ~4 years of Australian Valiant production, but they were a locally-made engine ones Lonsdale came online. It'd be completely easy for a vehicle assembler to recall North American-sourced engines in 1965 (or '64, or '63, or '66...) and for that memory to gel into a factoid that all Australian Valiants got North American-made slant-6s. I'm not sure there's much point in arguing too hard about it; the factory's own information tells us otherwise. That doesn't necessarily mean that every single slant-6 installed in Australia starting in '67 came out of Lonsdale; it's perfectly possible that some were imported after Lonsdale came online, but given that the local Australian content of the Valiant reached 95% with the '67 VE model (again, per factory literature), it'd be difficult to argue convincingly that most/many of the engines came from outside Australia.

And then there is this noise about the (Australian-market) base model slant-6 being somehow detuned compared to the American unit, necessitating the introduction of the 2bbl version. Wrong! The 2bbl version was introduced in '67 by a bunch of widely-distributed branches of Chrysler Export. Basically, almost everywhere in the world except North America where slant-6s were available, the 2bbl version became available in '67. South Africa, Australia, possibly Mexico, possibly various Central and South American countries. The setup was quite similar in all countries, but the intake manifolds for use in Australia were cast at Lonsdale, complete with A-prefix part and casting numbers. The carburetor (all over the world) was an American-made Carter BBD with integral heat-tube style choke. Air cleaners tended to be local. Other parts, such as linkages and brackets, were a mix of local and American-made. But I digress.

The base slant-6 in Australia was the same 145bhp unit as was offered in North America. Same camshaft, same compression, similar distributor calibrations (local distributors phased in not long after '62), and, depending on the production date, either same American Carter/Holley 1bbl carburetor or similar local Bendix-Technico (Stromberg) unit. Local starter (Bosch Australia) beginning in '63, local alternators (Email=Prestolite Australia, then Bosch Australia) phased in late in '66, but even when engine production moved to Lonsdale, the specs of the base slant-6 stayed the same: 225 cubic inches, nominal 8.4:1 compression, 1bbl carburetor, 145bhp, 215 lb-ft torque. Is that an accurate spec? Probably not, given that these published figures changed almost not at all from '60 to '71 despite three different camshafts and a bunch of different 1bbl carburetors and compression that (nominally) varied from 8.2 to 8.5. But those are the specs the factory cited, and forty-five years of public experience with stock slant-6s has failed to reveal any significant differences in HP and torque across all the emission-uncontrolled 1bbl slant-6s.

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Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

Great post Dan.

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Thanks Dan, that brought new life into the moparmarket forum thread!