heh heh heh Actually, I don't know what putting the throttles in "ahead" and going is like; my place on the boat (here's a picture of her, BTW) is in the engine room sucking up diesel exhaust I may not get to throttle the engines up anymore (our old boat had an EOT, so on that boat, I did get to shift and throttle; ohhh I miss those days...), but the thrill of firing up a 900 horsepower dual-turbo Cummins 1710 is pretty cool unto itself.

Also, for the record, it wasn't the first diesel stick I've driven...just the first Mercedes diesel stick. My truck has a 6.9l International-Harvester diesel, along with a 4 speed maual transmission; I used to have an '80 IH Scout with a 3.2l inline-6 turbo diesel that also had a 4 speed manual. Once I had the shift pattern figured out, the only thing I had difficulty getting used to with the 240D was the long wind-up between gears; the first couple times I shifted from 1st to 2nd, I lugged the engine After that, I decided to start upshifting right before the appropiate dot on the speedo, and did okay. After I realized that I was lugging the engine, shifting was pretty smooth...

BTW, as far as I know, there are exactly 3 people who have driven my truck who are capable of shifting her perfectly smoothly...one of whom is no longer alive. It's easy to drive (impossible to stall out), but (to most) it's very difficult to drive "right".

Actually, funny enough, the hardest thing to get used to on the 240D was the throttle pedal. On my 300D, there's a fair amount of resistance on the pedal; I have to keep a bit of pressure on it to keep at speed (can get a bit fatiguing in the long term, especially 'cause the cruise control currently doesn't work). On the 240D, there was hardly any resistance at all...it almost felt like I wasn't pushing anything; either my 300D's throttle linkage needs some serious greasing, or the 240D's was missing a spring (or maybe both?). I also think that either the clutch wasn't quite adjusted right or had very little life left, as the "grab point" was almost at the top of the pedal's travel.

I suppose I should re-phrase part of my first post; I wouldn't mind owning a 240D manual, but I don't wanna get rid of my 300D either.

Could be worse...I've mentioned this before, but a couple of weeks ago, I changed out the spark plugs on my mom's '94 Pontiac Grand Prix (3.1l V-6, front wheel drive). I had to undo two engine mounts and take a crowbar to rock the engine towards the front of the car to have a hope at getting to the rear plugs...

Maybe I'm real lucky in that I haven't needed to do any real engine work on the 300D (need to run some Diesel Purge and change the engine mounts and air cleaner mounts, though), but the work that I have done, I've found to be quite easy in comparison to anything else I've had. THe 617 may be hard to work on compared to the 616, but IMHO it's still superior (in terms of ease to work on, as well as in other fields) as compared to most other engines out there.