I have a tough time believing that connecting rods just bend from normal use. Seems far more likely the rod would fail from stretch than bending. Usually a connecting rod has to have the piston hit something for it to bend. Someone here theorized that the EGR system in the 350 produced chunks of carbon that were routinely ingested by the engine. A piston crushing carbon chunks seems like a more plausible explanation. A member on this board, OldSouth, has a 94 SD350 that he removed the EGR system from and converted the wastegate to a standard pressure type from the electronic version to get around the computer issues. Haven't seem him post here for a while but the mod seemed quite successful. RT

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