Diesel Pick Up Trucks

The Making of a Cummins 6.7-liter Diesel Engine

Cummins builds diesel engines well beyond 70 liters, so anything below the Class 5 truck market is “light duty” to them. However, the current High Output and standard 6.7-liter ISB inline-six oil burners in Ram’s 2500/3500 heavy-duty pickups and 3500/4500/5500 chassis cabs are built to medium-duty specifications. They’re made at the Columbus Midrange Engine Plant (CMEP) just south of Cummins’ world headquarters in Columbus, Ind. We stopped by to see where this popular truck engine is built.

CMEP was built on more than 400 acres in 1971, and it originally built components such as pistons, connecting rods, pulleys, rocker housings and water pumps. It closed in 1988 to convert to engine production and reopened in 1991, and it has fed Dodge/Ram assembly lines ever since. CMEP has supplied other chassis manufacturers, but that production pales in comparison with the Dodge numbers, and the plant should build engine No. 2 million sometime soon. Total manufacturing and office space totals 587,904 square feet.

Located just off Interstate 65, CMEP is easy to find by road or even by air. The red expanse is the plant’s roof, which doubles as the 500-space parking lot. Since the roof expands and contracts up to 16 inches in temperature extremes, sealing it is a regular maintenance item.

This is the closest assembly plant to Cummins HQ, though there is a facility in Columbus that machines heavy-duty blocks and heads and will machine and assemble a new engine currently under development. A polite “no comment” regarding what that engine is.

During our visit, the plant was building about 420 6.7 engines a day on a full-speed first shift and a quarter-speed third shift. The plant can produce substantially more; in 2004, it built 167,622 engines.

CMEP employs about 520 people, most of them on the plant floor and the remainder in the cubes and glass offices. There’s a central courtyard, and from virtually anywhere inside — including from the paint booth — you can see out to the lawns or woods. Occasionally, a wild turkey or deer will scamper by.

The plant has the usual array of loading docks, lube tanks, cafeteria and an auditorium of glass on four sides. In one sizable glass enclosure is a server bank glittering like a chunk of lava, just like the WOPR computer from the movie “WarGames.”

Line employees rotate every hour, and everyone we saw wore a pedometer. Pass a certain threshold, and it’s good for a health-insurance discount the following year. The recreation area is less than 15 minutes away, and there’s even an employee-volunteer straw-bale garden that delivered more than 500 pounds of produce to local charities last year.

The Making of a Cummins 6.7-liter Diesel Engine - PickupTrucks.com ...

Cummins builds diesel engines well beyond 70 liters, so anything below the Class 5 truck market is “light duty” to them. However, the current High Output and standard 6.7-liter ISB inline-six oil burners in Ram’s 2500/3500 heavy-duty pickups and 3500/4500/5500 chassis cabs are built to medium-duty specifications. They’re made at the Columbus Midrange Engine Plant (CMEP) just south of Cummins’ world headquarters in Columbus, Ind. We stopped by to see where this popular truck engine is built.

CMEP was built on more than 400 acres in 1971, and it originally built components such as pistons, connecting rods, pulleys, rocker housings and water pumps. It closed in 1988 to convert to engine production and reopened in 1991, and it has fed Dodge/Ram assembly lines ever since. CMEP has supplied other chassis manufacturers, but that production pales in comparison with the Dodge numbers, and the plant should build engine No. 2 million sometime soon. Total manufacturing and office space totals 587,904 square feet.

Located just off Interstate 65, CMEP is easy to find by road or even by air. The red expanse is the plant’s roof, which doubles as the 500-space parking lot. Since the roof expands and contracts up to 16 inches in temperature extremes, sealing it is a regular maintenance item.

This is the closest assembly plant to Cummins HQ, though there is a facility in Columbus that machines heavy-duty blocks and heads and will machine and assemble a new engine currently under development. A polite “no comment” regarding what that engine is.

During our visit, the plant was building about 420 6.7 engines a day on a full-speed first shift and a quarter-speed third shift. The plant can produce substantially more; in 2004, it built 167,622 engines.

CMEP employs about 520 people, most of them on the plant floor and the remainder in the cubes and glass offices. There’s a central courtyard, and from virtually anywhere inside — including from the paint booth — you can see out to the lawns or woods. Occasionally, a wild turkey or deer will scamper by.

The plant has the usual array of loading docks, lube tanks, cafeteria and an auditorium of glass on four sides. In one sizable glass enclosure is a server bank glittering like a chunk of lava, just like the WOPR computer from the movie “WarGames.”

Line employees rotate every hour, and everyone we saw wore a pedometer. Pass a certain threshold, and it’s good for a health-insurance discount the following year. The recreation area is less than 15 minutes away, and there’s even an employee-volunteer straw-bale garden that delivered more than 500 pounds of produce to local charities last year.

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