I worked for a large company that did drive trains for trucks of all sizes, and we had roughly 40 engines running on any given day of the week. Everything from a gas turbine to a V16 locomotive engine. Not a lot of gasoline engines anymore, but we'd still do some a couple times a year. When you trash a V16 engine, you just spent a quarter million dollars (and we've done more than our share!). Everytime we blew up an engine (if we owned it), they would examine what was left to try and identify what went wrong. One of the things that showed up more often than one would have thought was a catastrophic lube failure. Then we brought in a lubrication engineer out of Detroit, and he started examining the oils before we lost an engine. At the time we used a lot of Mobil and Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) when they made really good stuff. Used nothing but Mobil One in all gasoline engines I might add.
After the guy had been there about six weeks he came down to ask me to help build some tools to check oil quality. He had sketches, and I worked off an on with him for about a year. He had us get rid of oil filters by the truck load! Then he simply said we had to find a better oil for the diesel engines first as they were the most expensive to fix. He was sending guys all over the place buying cases of oil (some I'd never heard of before). Then he finds that we had a similar problem with all the rolling stock, and even machinery. Then he started pulling even more samples, and they found the whole place was in trouble. He narrowed it down to about six or eight, and then he got serious. That's when he had me make some new tools, and was literally destroying the oil to find out which was best. He had me build a hydraulically loaded device that ran about 2500 rpm to test main and rod bearings. It was setup to measure the oil temperature going into the bearing and the output temperature to see how much heat the oil was taking back to the oil pan. That's when we switched to the Castrol in a couple dyno mules (a Duramax and a V12) the engines must have gained 40% better life with the new filters and oil. Then he had us try a new brand of fuel, and that helped a bit. That's when I found out the way the CPU's and sensors are setup. At one time we were loosing a V16 engine every four to five months, and about a third of these were unrebuildable. We had Cummins six cylinder engines that we put well over 700,000 miles on them, and were running fine when we sent them back to Cummins. After that we put him to work on machinery, and he made a lot of changes. One major issue was water contamination in hydraulic systems, and he never got rid of it 100%, but I'd say he reached the 75% mark. We were looking for a good oil water separator, but never found a good one. He got rid of 90% of all paraffin based lube oils right away, and that made a serious improvement. We'd been trying to get that done for ten years prior.
I learned a lot from that guy
gary
