I recently won an Ebay auction for a $100 '73 220D with a non-running OM616 engine. Turns out that the car had been a 16 yr old's first project, and things went horribly awry--not good for me.

He pulled the head to fix a bad headgasket, but among other things, not only did he have the cam timing off by a full gear tooth, he also inexplicably removed two of the threaded coolant passage plugs under the valve cover, then proceeded to cross-thread SAE plugs back in their place. Needless to say, the car did not run correctly again, but it also filled up the crankcase with coolant when those plugs failed to hold pressure.

My question regards whether I can feasibly replace the OM616 head with a spare OM615 version that came with the car. The latter has smaller valves and seats, so the breathing will be restricted somewhat--not optimal by far. Keep in mind that this is a cheap car in sad shape that I want to keep around as a beater runabout (and SVO/WVO testmule), while investing very little $. I'm particularly interested to find out if there are any inherent incompatibility issues that would keep me from swapping these heads.

Any thoughts?

In an interesting twist, there's a guy over on the mbz.org diesel list that has an OM616 head on a Euro 200D OM615 engine.

I've been told , by someone who should know, that these heads are not interchangeable.

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Diesel-guy