One of our contracted clients got in contact with us the other day. They’d been having problems starting their CAT 3412 engine and in finding the cause, they managed to prevent a bigger problem.Onboard, they found the starter ring was damaged – this was a result of the regular high forces applied by the starter motor pinion.  As a safety critical engine, they are reliant on it being available during certain operations and with...

Last week one of our MTU trained engineers, Matt, headed out with his laptop, complete with DiaSys diagnostic software.He was tasked with looking at a couple of MTU 20V4000G62 generator sets, which were having various problems with alarms, hunting and synchronisation.Once Matt got onsite, he started to look at the hunting and synchronisation issues on the first set by connecting up the laptop to see what information there was from the MDEC.This...

I’ve little doubt that you’re carrying out monitoring of your engine performance, but how effective is that monitoring at giving the information you really need? I ask because we’ve just come back from the investigation of an engine failure, and one of our recommendations is to improve the way they collect this type of information. The original investigation was around the cause of broken pushrods, and subsequent damage to the...

We were overhauling a Caterpillar engine in the workshop the other day when we came across some significant damage – which is not an uncommon sight on engines with wet liners. We’d removed the cylinder liners and inspected the crankcase, and this is what was found: You’ll see the damage caused by fretting on both the liner and the crankcase e-bore. Whilst the liner was going to be changed as part of the overhaul, there are...

Whilst carrying out some investigations into oil leaks on a Waukesha engine last week, our engineer, Charlie, came across a separate issue which was causing a loss in power and effectiveness to the engine performance. As part of the investigations, he removed the pistons and found a common problem: Those with a keen eye (like Charlie) will notice that the gaps in the piston rings are near each other, almost in line with each other in some...

This week we had a stark reminder of the importance of making sure your engine oil is kept at the right temperature.We’d completed the overhaul of a Deutz driven generator package and prepared the unit for the first test run.And during that first test run, there was a problem.As part of the preparations, the oil heaters were left on for 8 hours, but when the engine started, it only registered around 20 Psi pressure, so was shut down...