IH International Harvester DT-358 I-6 Diesel Engine

Last crawled date: 9 months, 3 weeks ago

This engine is the predecessor to the American DT360 and DT466 series, and part of the Neuss engine family built in the Neuss plant in Germany. The other Neuss engines are the 3 cylinder D155 and D179, 4 cylinder D206, D239, DT239, D246, D268, & DT268, and the 6 cylinder D310, D358, DT358, and DT402. They were produced from the mid 60's through the 80's, and used in just about everything, tractors, combines, cotton pickers, construction equipment, and Seddon Atkinson trucks in England and ACCO trucks in Australia. My DT358 came from a Dresser (known as Yumbo overseas) 520B front end loader. The DT358 has a 98.4mm bore, 128.5mm stroke, and made 130hp & 340 lb-ft stock. The injector pump is an Ag spec Bosch VE, that I will be upgrading with cummins VE governor parts to get more RPM, from 2500 to 3600. I also upgraded the valve springs to handle the higher RPM, may not have been neccessary because they were set to 3000rpm in the truck application. IH never put this engine in pickups, but If they had kept offering factory diesel pickups this would have been the next engine they would use, although it would have probably ended up in the '69 and up D series square body trucks. The D301 indirect injection is the engine that was offered in factory diesel pickups. Tractors that had the D301 were upgraded to the German D310, which is just a shorter stroke version of this DT358 engine. If public demand for diesel pickups had grown in the late 60's, or if IH had still been producing light trucks during the gas crisis in the 70's, I believe IH would have selected the D-358 or DT-358 as the next truck engine as they are more powerful. The DT-360 is way too heavy, and this DT-358 is the same displacement as a Cummins 5.9L, but slightly smaller and lighter. Imagine an '88 newer body style IH 'E' series factory diesel competing with a 1st gen Dodge Cummins! Why did IH use German engines in American equipment? When it came time to retire the D282/D301 series IDI engine that were built at Melrose Park plant in the mid 60's, they wanted to upgrade to a direct injection design. The American IH plants had no direct injection engines in development, and the German Neuss plant had been producing them for a couple of years. So rather than waste money on retooling Melrose Park they just shipped the Neuss engines over. The money they saved went into R&D on a new American designed direct injection engine, the D312 series. The Neuss engines were put in American tractors until the D312 was ready for production, so for a few years in the mid to late 60's you could buy several different models of IH tractors with German engines. Then they started putting the D312 in US tractors in 1972, and started developing the mighty DT360/DT466 series engines which are still made today. After the DT466 went into production the demand for DT powered trucks rose in 1975, the plant couldn't produce enough for trucks and tractors, so they used the already produced 312 and 360's and put all the 466's in trucks. In '79 they ran out of DT's for tractors and began importing Neuss engines again. Eventually production capacity caught up and they started using the DT's in tractors again, which they continued on through until the 80's and the merger with Case to form Case-IH, at which point they switched to the joint Case/Cummins developed B series (3.9/5.9L) and C series (8.3L) Cummins engines. All this time Neuss kept on making the German engines, which were used in almost all overseas tractors, equipment, and some trucks (All European tractors except England, Australian tractors and ACCO trucks, some Seddon-Atckinson English trucks). Even after the Merger some Euro Case-IH tractors used the Neuss engines before being replaced with the Cummins and more recently Iveco engines.