SCOUTING THE ROAD TO DIESEL POWER

TWO SURVIVING PROTOTYPE SCOUT DIESELS

- JIM ALLEN

The International Scout was diesel before diesel was cool. Diesels were nothing new for International Harvester, in their truck lines and, of course, in the agricultural and off-highway equipment lines. In the latter part of 1971, the IH sales department decided adding diesel power to the new Scout II was a good thing.

That wasn’t a new idea either. Going back as early as the 1961 intro of the first generation Scout 80, International noodled the idea of diesel power. At that time, they had introduced a diesel option into their light truck line, the D301. We covered that in 2018 and you can see the story online at the link below. As far as the Scout was concerned, the early motivation was for export markets like Australia, where Scouts sold reasonably well. Then the Arab Oil Embargo happened in 1973 and added a domestic possibility with a new urgency.

International did their research and rounded up a number of suitable diesel powerplants to try in the Scout. All were of a similar physical size and weight and had similar sub-100 hp outputs. Our history of the engineering that led to the Chrysler-Nissan CN6-33 being chosen for large scale production is incomplete but we know parts of the story and have two running prototypes to learn from. This is a little bit of their story.

TEST ENGINE- IH D301