 I used to drive a cabover Pete with a 350hp Cat that developed a knock in the engine. While running with another driver I told him on the cb that I thought the my engine was knocking and he guessed that our light load wasn't working it enough. When I got back to the terminal I reported the knock to the trucks owner and the shop forman. They looked at it and the forman drove the truck bobtail a couple of miles and gave it a clean bill of health. So I went out right then and hooked a trailer full of minerals with a max gross and took off for Springfield, Mass. The next morning on I-81 the engine exploded at 70mph coming down a mountain in VA. I thought that I blew a tire and looked out the right mirror to see engine parts flying off the side of the truck along with a major smoke cloud.
One of the things that ran through my mind is that in the past when I lost power in other trucks and tried to down shift and the engine stopped turning then I lost power steering and the truck became seriously hard to control. I wasn't about to lose control of this truck at 70mph coming down a mountain. Besides, from what I could see this engine was a goner anyway. To make a long story short, I got a call about a week later that the no. 1 piston had been destroyed when a valve dropped and the block was severed in half because I let the engine turn. They discussed this with the Cat dealer and decided that I had over-reved the engine and caused it to blow despite the fact that I had reported it knocking. They should have been pointing the finger at the shop forman and not me. I asked them if Cat said how much rpm would have cause this and they told me "at least 5000". I told them that this was BS as I couldn't have gotten that engine to 5000rpm if I had dropped it out of an airplane. These people used to be friends of mine...used to be. I was their best driver and posted the highest revenue in the company but they constantly harped on me about that Pete and how much I had cost them. I moved on and a couple of years later I see the old man comming at me in his two story Falcon on a road in Ga. When I called him on the cb the first words out of his mouth were about the Pete, I said "nice to talk to ya" and turned my radio off. Btw, There was no other indication of valve or piston damage in this engine. The no. 1 cylinder was the location of all the damage, I saw the disassembled engine. The crank was good. Actually I could write a book about the poor maintenance history of this company and how they always blamed the drivers for it.
| 
