I remembered some more of that story. Too much stuff is dropping into the archive files in my head now days. Thanks for jogging some more memory cells loose. The Shin Mitzui Caterpillar and the time frame makes perfect sense. The MDI part of that story was actually Mitsubishi and MDI Yutani. I was told that in those days both the Mitsubishi and the Kobelco units were made by Kobe Steel and that was the connection on those two machines. The Mitsu units all had Mitsubishi engines in them and as I recall so did the early Kobelco units. I don't recall when the Kobelco machines got the Cummins engines but I think it was before the MDI machines disappeared. I did get into the bottom ends of a couple of inline six Mitsu diesel engines and I thought they were pretty impressive at that time. Four bolt main bearings, lots of meat in the block webs and the main bearings seemed a lot wider than the engines built in the US in that time frame. I had an E650 in my customer base for some time that had the Mitsu engine in it. There wasn't anything left to rebuild when it finally died. There were no parts for it anyway so the owner had it pulled and installed a Cummins big cam truck engine in the machine and only had moderate success with it for a couple of years. It's now parked on top of a ridge with berry briars as thick as my forearms growing over the top of the machine.