Re: Screamin' Detroits

Posted by RBoots on January 02, 2019 at 19:52:43 from (174.255.4.47):

In Reply to: Screamin' Detroits posted by Dean on January 02, 2019 at 11:31:06:

At the heavy equip dealer I used to work for, I got assigned to a real nice engine swap project on old cranes. The deal was, if a contractor had an old Detroit powered crane, the govt would pay 75% of the bill to have these cranes refit with a modern (at the time, 10 or so years ago) Cummins electronic common rail engine, a few of the larger 8+ liter engine (whichever replaced the 8.3), but mostly 6.7s and the smaller 4 cylinder Cummins common rail (I forget the size now) in a couple. This was an effort by the govt to help reduce emissions, I didn't have any part in that, I was just doing the work. I think I did the refit to 10 cranes, about half crawler cranes and half truck cranes with 2 engine, one for the crane and one for propulsion of the truck. Most of the truck cranes had 6-71, 6V or 8V-71's for propulsion, and most had 3 or 4-71s up top in the dog house to run the crane. The bigger crawler cranes had 6-71s in the doghouse, but there was one smaller one with a 4-71. The replacement engines came basically as a powerpack or power unit, mounted on a heavy duty metal frame work with air cleaners and radiators mounted, always with a predetermined correspondingly sized SAE bellhousing and a flywheel of some sort. Keep in mind, the only easy mate of the engine was to the transmission on the truck cranes. As long as the right SAE bellhousing and flywheel for a manual transmission had been ordered. All of the engines that ran the crane functions, were mated to either a torque converter, or a massive gearbox with 4-6 hyd pump drives coming off from the back of them. Those ones required the original Detroit flywheels be sent to a machine shop along with the new Cummins flywheels to be mated together into one correct flywheel. All of these old Detroit engines had to be destroyed so that nothing could be salvaged for a running engine, which leads to my original story. It had to be documented that they were destroyed by a govt witness. We had to cut the crankshaft, and cut a hole in the blower, the block, and in the cylinder head. I had an engine that I was in the process of removing from the rear of a truck crane, it was a 4-71. It had been setting outside for a week while I waited for parts, in very cold temperatures, like in the teens for highs. The hyd pump drive gearbox that had been mounted on the back of the engine had been uncoupled and slid away from the engine. The engine was just setting there, bolted down, ready to be removed, but still had fuel and wiring to it. The air cleaner had been removed, so I could look right into the blower rotors from the top. That morning, I had just got to the shop and was going to pull the engine, so I decided to do a little experiment before I pulled it inside. I hooked a bungee cord to the throttle to hold it wide open, hooked up my remote start button, then climbed up and sprayed an entire can of ether directly into the blower. Not a small can either, one of the large cans. I sort of crawled under the upper structure for some sort of protection, and hit the start button. While that old Detroit roared to life at full speed in under a second it seemed, it never missed a beat or ran rough at all. It ran as though I had just shut it off and started it back up, only at wide open throttle. It was 5°F at the time I started it. I ran it without coolant for about wide open for probably 10 minutes while the lower engine that had already been swapped to the Cummins warmed up. It ran right along, wide open, that whole time, purring(?), more like screaming, up until I shut it off to pull the crane inside. And that concluded what my experiment of what would happen if an entire can of ether was sprayed into a very cold Detroit and started at wide open throttle. Count me as a Detroit fan.

Replies:

• Re: Screamin' Detroits Dean 06:24:29 01/03/19 (0)

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