GM L67 LIM Gasket (Faulty Design?)

[doctorhrdware]

No Tim not at all. I can dish it out as well as take it. That is what happens when you hire engineers right out of college. I think they need to make them work on repairing cars, for a while to see how hard it is to repair them.

[richtazz]

No, that's what happens when a car company gets too big for it britches and has the accountants standing over the engineers shoulder saying, "nope, make it cheaper".

A perfect example of this is the 3800 water pump. When GM went to the Vin-K series-II, they rerouted the serp belt to take much of the load off the water pump bearings (as this was one of the highest failure parts on the previous Vin-L 3800). Then the accountants, seeing the reduction in bearing load demanded a weaker (and cheaper) bearing for the Vin-K's water pump due to the reduction in load. Result, the water pump is still a high failure part on the Vin-K Series-II 3800. Here's the kicker, the cheaper bearing saved them less than 10 cents per engine.

['97ventureowner]

Originally Posted by richtazz

No, that's what happens when a car company gets too big for it britches and has the accountants standing over the engineers shoulder saying, "nope, make it cheaper".

That's exactly what some people were saying in a news story I watched last night concerning the downfall of GM. One of the questions they asked people, some of them GM employees and some analysts I believe said that the downfall started when accountants started taking over the decision making and those like the designers and engineers had less of a say in the final decisions.

[richtazz]

[doctorhrdware]

I stand corrected.