During a recent job, we realised that the cylinders on the engine had been misidentified.
It reminded me of a much more serious problem we’ve seen before, which you can see in the picture below.
All this was as a result of the A-bank pistons being fitted in the B-bank and vice versa.
Not only is it critical to return the pistons to the correct bank of the engine, but when it comes to communicating, resolving and recording engine information, it is just as important to correctly identify the cylinder, as not all manufacturers use the same system.
Different engines can be labelled as ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ or ‘A’ and ‘B’ with cylinders numbered from the drive end or the free end.
MTU use the ISO1204 system for numbering cylinders, where Paxman use the opposite.
Waukesha use a mix of the two and Caterpillar only use numbers and no letters. Mitsubishi also use only numbers but in a completely different way to Caterpillar!
