My understanding is that the exhaust seat is induction hardened, not a separate pressed-in hardened seat insert. The casting is too thin for this type of treatment to work correctly.

It's the same among all vehicles produced by the big 3 during this time. They were trying to squeeze every last bit of life out of a 30 year old engine design, in an effort to cut costs. These vehicles weren't meant to see more than 10 years of service life, that's just how they were built before gas went through the roof. When foreign cars became more popular in the late 90's the domestic automakers were slow to respond.

With the crappy economy, everyone is holding on to vehicles longer and the wear characteristics are really starting to show. When I go to purchase my next vehicle, I'll definitely be swinging by the local auto shops and asking which trucks they see the least.

 

Bad design, Mopar ****ed up.

 

And to build off that (letting the mechanic sell that car rather than the sales associates), I've started obtaining the FSM of car's that I think rather fit our family best, and then going through each section to see what the typical procedures are for the maintenance intervals.

Do you feel that domestic automakers are now finally starting to see the pressure to put out a vehicle that is more dependable, and less service prone because of pressure from the foreign automakers?

 

Yes. It is especially noticeable since some of the foreign automakers are cutting costs to make money and are consequently cutting quality.

 

I've noticed that of recent VW's. (No offense VWandDodge)

 

Believe it or not, Toyota and Honda too.
The opposite is true for Hyundai and Kia, they have gone up.
And they look better to boot.

 

Not to mention Toyota, and Honda, both having several rather high profile recalls in recent years...... They expanded to fast, and forgot the philosophy that made their cars popular here to begin with. When detroit was turning out beercans on wheels, the foreign makes were producing cars that would go a couple hundred thousand miles with just regular maintenance.

 

Well its good to know I can say things like I'm considering, at some point, replacing our 1998 Camry with a newer Hyundai Sonata or, quite possibly, another Camry of that generation. The JDM engine I got runs beautifully, installed with a breeze (took me a while cause I had never done it before but I'm pretty sure I could do it in a couple weeks this time, in my spare time). It had 80k on the engine when we bought it and have since put about 40k on the engine with no SEL's after 38K.

I only run high quality synthetics in it, and after 6k, its still a caramel brown color.

 

I had a 80 something honda accord that my dad gave me..... it had 180K on it when I got it. (I was like the three dozenth owner.....) Only trouble I had with it was the pressure relief valve got stuck, so, the engine was getting full pump pressure...... needless to say, the oil filter just wasn't designed with that in mind.... so, the tended to become perfectly spherical, then burst.... (in about three seconds.....)

Fixed that, but, had some knock..... figgered I would just slap in new rod and main bearings, and call it a day..... Little did I know, that crank journals, rod journals, rod ends, and crank bearing seats were all CODED according to size....... so, you had to have ALL the codes, in order to get the correct bearings. No one-size-fits-all there....

Once I HAD the bearings, slapped it together, drove it another 3 years (120K miles....) and sold it, still running fine.... to a teenager for her first car. She drove it for two years, and finally retired it when she got rear-ended at stop light..... the car was STILL running fine.

 

Yeah, it's total pain in the *** to kill an 80's-90's Honda. You just can't do it without actually trying to do it.