Blown CAT D-398

[HB of CJ]

I'm a retired RN among other things and perhaps hospital APUs (gen sets) don't get the best of maintenance.  Sometimes the head engineer/electriction (sp) is very good at medical gismos but knows practically nothing about HD gen sets.

Hospitals mostly chose diesel gen sets because they needed one and the house designers just said buy this size and place it there..  Every week they ran it for one hour to test all the fire doors and standby medical circuits which was a good idea.

The bad idea was they never changed the fuel filtures or checked the BIG fuel tank diesel for bad bugs and cooties and stuff.  I remember at least once the gen set failed due to bad fuel.  Later we found that the lube oil was never changed.

They had to replace the entire fuel tank.  It was full of the black death.  Oh well.  Sossss, do my comments have any connection with a blown up big Cummins V12?  Dunno.  Maybe it was just the time for the old girl to let go.  HB of CJ (old coot)

[JackConrad]

Here is additional information from my brother regarding this blown CAT:
    It is an old Cat D-398 diesel.  We think the fuel rack stuck open and it didn't have any load on it.  It was driving a 600kW 4.16kV 3 phase generator.  There was an old Civil Defense decal on the generator so I suspect it to be about 50 years old, at least.  It was used for emergency standby only so it probably only had a few thouand hours if that.

[luvrbus]

That engine has a injector control for each cylinder and a shear shaft can't see that happening Jack but I did blow a D 333 up like that with either back in my younger days back when you could buy either in the drug stores


good luck

[JackConrad]

Not sure who told my brother about the stuck fuel rack.  My brother is a electrical engineer and heads the R&D department where he works (they manufacture generator control switching systems), but not a diesel mechanic.  Jack