TRUST ME when I say I know the problems with the 6.0L PowerCerebrovascularAccident.
Ford replaced so many that they devised a way to pull the engine without the previously-required full body lift. One step of the factory procedure involved 17 wobble extensions in series.
It turned out you could build a reasonably stable 6.0 if you did the right things with the right parts… ARP head studs tensioned to something like 425ft/lb, full EGR delete complete with machined plug, carefully rebuilt injectors with laser-profiled nozzles… etc. I had no real complaint with a 28mpg Excursion (no Gear Vendors, either) when all was said and done, but the list of design boners that should never have been committed was astoundingly large.
I will admit I was puerile the second time I was told the shop could find nothing wrong with my injectors – I pulled around, went back in, and in front of the service writer’s desk dropped it in neutral and ran the engine up to about 4000rpm. Filled all the bays with smoke in about 20 seconds. That did not help them find the problems although it certainly motivated them to do so.
Making it clear, to me, why so few ‘automobile’ manufacturers are building the diesels that they are putting in their products - leaving the engine production to the experienced diesel enging builders - Cummins, Detroit Diesel etc.
Just having experience in manufacturing gasoline internal combustion engines doesn’t give one all the tricks of the trade required to build long lasting properly operating diesels.
“Not a true diesel” could refer to the early “oil-electric” (occasionally “gas-electric”) locomotives.
I believe the first was built for the Minneapolis St.Paul Rochester & Dubuque Electric Traction Co., better known as the “Dan Patch Electric Line”, in 1913. They wanted to build a railroad with overhead wire electricity, but were concerned about the expense of putting up the wire. GE offered to put an oil-burning electric generator into an otherwise standard GE boxcab electric engine. That allowed the engine to run independently right away, but it could be later converted to straight electric.
After the railroad’s founder, Col. Marion Savage, died in 1918, the railroad was reorganized as the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern Ry. It sold off it’s internal-combustion engines and began using steam, although they began buying diesel locomotives shortly before WW2. #100 was eventually converted to straight electric by a subsidiary of GN IIRC. It is now on display at the MN Transportation Museum’s Jackson St. Roundhouse just north of downtown St.Paul.
“Oil-Electric” was a euphemism, like Liberty Cabbage or Liberty Hound, to avoid the G-word context after the Great War. It avoided having to mention the hatable Hun name of the inventor of pure compression ignition.
The motors in the Canadian road locomotive were Beardmores, designed for airship use and hence light enough for rail express use. To my knowledge the Ingersoll-Rand switchers used compression ignition, although I don’t remember offhand if direct or indirect injection. That was long before Ricardo invented the swirl chamber that made high-compression-ratio IDI engines so good.
The 567 and its successors are all, of course, direct injection engines, and prior to EFI were completely mechanical… a jerk-pump design akin to the 8.2L Detroit (an engine highly dependent on precise volumetric equality of all 8 cylinders, which was accomplished with calibrated washers chosen at the factory)
I can’t remember a locomotive engine with glow plugs in the head or intake.
A key difference with the ‘semi-diesel’ is that it still relies on heat to volatilize the fuel in the intake charge, then uses high compression to get density and heat into the charge but still times the engine with spark. This has the advantage of not requiring any sort of precise injection system, whether mechanical or air, and can ‘run all day on the smell of an oily rag’ on nonvolatile fuel of crappy quality. One notes that some of the ‘vaporizing carburetors’ that ultimately culminated in the Fish “200mpg” device beloved of conspiracy theorists, would be a ‘natural’ to use exhaust or cooling-jacket heat to warm things up to the appropriate induction charge density.
Most things using this engine type would be hard to get to the speed where ram air would produce ‘supercharging’, and the overall contribution to charge density might be slight. However, I refer 'dude to the Franklin Supercharged Airm
IIRC, the I-R engines were direct injection. One notable detail of the I-R fuel injection pumps was that tolerances of the injector plunger and cylinder were such that the plunger needed a coat of diesel fuel to slide in the corresponding cylinder.
The Cummins engine in my 1991 Dodge had strip heaters in the intake manifold for aid in cold starting. Having said that, I don’t remember seeing any indication that a locomotive engine was so equipped. I recall that nuclear plant back-up diesel generators are typical kept with the coolant at 120F or so to allow for quick starts and rapid loading.
To my knowledge all the early jerk pump injectors were like that. The father of my best friend in high school had been a mechanic on 567s in WWII and he noted that you couldn’t assemble the injector if there was a fingerprint on it.
Among the fun features of the Ford 6.0L injectors was that they were provided with a DLC (‘diamond-like coating’) to reduce wear from ULSD. If the fuel flow was impeded, as for example ‘running out of fuel’, the injectors continued to operate with high-pressure oil actuation, and would almost promptly ruin the bores… necessitating a rebuild or new injectors each time.
I don’t think the situation on the 1994 6.5TD, which had one of the early Stanadyne ‘electronic’ injection pumps and pop injectors, was as serious, but the common word in the diesel community was to use Stanadyne additive regularly to prevent wear damage.
Many ‘expensive’ German cars feature a Shop-Vac like blower arrangement that pressurizes and preheats the air in the intake tract at starting. They also have electric elements to preheat the cats.
My trucks all had PLATE oil-pan heaters, and recirculating coolant heating (the kinds of ‘plug in’ heating with a little coil element inside the pan, or in the block through a core/freeze plug, aren’t worth a Campbell’s condensed cat crap). There is an interesting approach to pre-lubing that doesn’t require an explicit accumulator and pressure valves, which I fir
Well, except that the Dan Patch Lines “oil electrics” were built in 1913, four years before the US entered World War 1 - in fact, it was before the war in Europe had even started. The engine used to create electricity wasn’t a diesel.
BTW - odd fact, although Rudolf Diesel’s parents were German, Rudolf was born in Paris, and lived in France and England growing up - he didn’t live in Germany until he was 12.
Try using starting fluid on a diesel with a intake heater and see what happens…
Large locomotive engines don’t have grid heaters or glow plugs but most new units do have pre-lube pumps. Turbo EMDs in particular tend to have them wired directly to the battery, and we’re supposed to leave the turbo lube breaker turned on even after manually shutting down a unit and opening the main battery switch.
CAT engines in heavy equipment like tractors and bulldozers used to have both glow plugs and a small gasoline ‘pony engine’ instead of an electric starter motor, along with a decompression handle.
And a late reply to a thread dormant since August:
As I recall the Cat equipment I was around did not have glow plugs unless it had electric start. The pony engines provided heat as well as cranking by circulating common coolant through both engines. There may well have been models that had both, I just never knew of them. Diesel John Deere tractors before the 4000 series also had pony motor starting as an option on the diesel models, I do not remember any other farm equipment sold in the 60’s that had this feature.
Glow plugs are electrical with a high current requirement. This would necessitate that the pony engine be equipped with a generator, alternator or magneto to supply the required electricity in the absence of a battery. Since the purpose of a glowplug is to reduce the time needed to build up appropriate combustion heat, the purpose is served by ‘extended’ pony cranking against compression (full or reduced) and the aforementioned common coolant heating, which serves the same purpose as an electric block heater.
Batteries are relatively sensitive and require careful maintenance, neither of which is sensible for a piece of construction equipment used ‘out in the woods’ in what may be severe climate conditions and potentially not started for protracted periods of time.
Some pony engines had an electric starter in addition to the hand crank or pull cord, or at least were retrofitted with one, which of course means the machine carried a battery.
The bit about glow plugs came from a discussion with a friend who used to operate a dozer on the farm or jobsites like pipelines. I almost wonder if theirs was a cold weather option for regions like western Canada or perhaps a one-off unit with an engine that had been rebuilt with a head that already had glow plugs. At any rate they were able to get it started pretty much anywhere and in any weather.
Electric starter motor had all it could do to get the pony motor started.
YouTuber Andrew Camarata has a number of pieces diesel powered construction equipment of multiple flavors in addition to a ‘castle’ he built out of intermodal containers on his rural property in New York state. In various videos he fires up the equipment whenever and wherever needed - seemingly with little difficulty for the most part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYMBN1CD378