The next time you're building an engine, think about the “gasket” that you pour into it.
www.motortrend.com
Precision, two-step bore honing?
I got so excited I near pissed myself!
Thanks for sharing this good stuff. Motortrend rocks.
Which, of course, also sparks an old fart story. Onan generator product plan called for an increase into Caterpillar high horsepower territory, 2 megawatt generators. Yours truly was Technical Project Leader. Cummins developed a new 3,000 hp engine, QSK60, based off KTA50, completely new block, heads. Only bore spacing remained.
In the spirit of design-build for fastest development, we got a prototype engine that wasn't quite, um, developed.
We built it into a test generator and started it. We ran various light tests, not trusting the thing as they kept swapping parts on it.
One day it suddenly lost power and puked oil out the breather. Had to e-stop it.
Tear down revealed bore polishing all 18 cylinders after only 200 hours of mild test running. Oil analysis showed casting sand contamination. The sandy oil lapped the cylinders to a mirror finish in only 200 hours run time.
Engine had 1st steel pistons in Cummins history (1997). Federal-Mogul shipped to Cummins but forget to clean casting sand out. Cummins saw it but shipped to us anyway, since they took us over, they didn't care and didn't tell us either.
Then they took the cost of the rebuild of their mistake out of our budget. Our President came down from the tower to rant and rave at us, about had a stroke. They fired him a year later.
Excerpt from: "My Life in Corporate Hell"