Suburban Diesel

"I never had driven a diesel and didn't know about chipping the engine," Buff admits. "Then got in one and threw the switch on a hill. I was so hooked it wasn't even funny."


Fortunately, Buff's friend and mechanic Ed Erekson had already wanted to a do diesel conversion on a Suburban and, thanks to Buff's newfound passion, he agreed to fund the project. Little did they know that it would take about a year of hard work and lots of programming time on the engine computer, with some help from a whiz on GM software.

Computer Love

"The biggest difference between our diesel conversion and other projects is that we figured out how to make the computers talk to each other," Buff says. "We got the Suburban's computer to adapt to the signals from the Duramax." The result is a seamless, integrated engine management system that can even work with the OnStar diagnostics, he claims.


As evidence of that, Bub Broten says whenever he pulls into the Chevy dealership, the service writers and mechanics swarm over the engine bay, and can't believe it's not a factory install. After 50,000 miles of driving on the diesel, Bub says the only problem he's encountered is an injector failure, but that was not related to the conversion. Also, the three-inch lift makes the vehicle a little more top-heavy in the handling, but that's not a significant issue.


Duramax Suburban's conversions are available for 2000 to 2006 Suburbans, and '01 to '06 Duramax engines. Buff says he tries to keep the engine model year the same as the vehicle's, or at most one year apart. He prefers not to tackle the 2003 model because of the injector change during that year.