Road service

The other day I was sent to Mount Vernon due to a blown out radiator hose on the side of the road. We did not have the correct hose so I had to put something together to get the truck back to the yard. Here is a picture of what I did.

Here is what I put together. I cut up some water hose and where the downward bend is I used some metel pipe. 

That is where the hose blew.
Also couple days ago I fixed a interior door storage compartment. The screws holding the compartment together broke off. So I used some thin metel and rivets to hold everything together. But Also on this same truck I walked by and noticed a bolt missing from a spring hanger.  Here are some pictures...

Here is how I fixed it, it's a small fix but worked well.

Missing bolt in the spring hanger, I put a new bolt back in. 

Cummins quick serve

In school i got the chance to connect to a truck with a lap top using quick serve to diagnose trouble codes. The the best way was to just disconnected sensors and to see if i can find the reason the light on the dash appears. This is pretty new to me i have spent about two hours just seeing whats there, trying to get comfortable with quick serve. What i learned so far is go to the reason first. Find out why that check engine light is on and fix that problem. Then go on to see if anything is else is wrong but first always go to the reason.  Diagnostics using the laptop is defiantly  something i want to get more into and possible to be hired to do. Here is a picture...

Also the other day a truck came in to get new steer axle brakes. But when i pulled the drum off it was all white and same with the inside of the rim. Well what happened is the rim was very old so it was wore out and only about half of the drums surface was flush with the rim. I could actually feel the inside of the rim it was like a ridge where the drum had worn in. So i talked to the driver and we agreed that the truck needed new drums and new rims as well.  Here are some pictures to better explain.

Cat 3516 Engine

At school i got the chance to tore down one cylinder head of the cat Cat 3516. This engine is a lot of fun to work on because of how big everything is. But also because everything is so big and just right there i got a much better understanding of how all the components work. Here are some pictures of what i have done so far i will start to reassemble everything next week for next weeks blog.

Injector

Showing how the big the piston and connecting rod are.

Cylinder Liner

That is the engine my cylinder head is the fourth one from the top or fly wheel.

Clutch worksheet

In class today I went through three trucks looking at the different styles of clutches. They vary from style, size, and adjustment style. I learned about how a hydraulic clutch works I had never seen one before. I did a work sheet here is a picture of it and a picture of me adjusting a clutch.

Me adjusting the clutch 

Me using the clutch adjusting tool to see if it's the right amount of play 1/2" 

Finished worksheet 

Rear end change

This week I did a rear end swap. The driver complained about noise coming from his second axle rear end. So I drained the oil and found metal and on the magnetic check plug there was a chunk of metal there as well. To remove the rear end I welded a hook to the top for the forklift to hook on to it. I removed the axles, drive shaft, and unbolted the rear end along with inner axle lock air line. And out it came pretty easy. To install the new rear end I cleaned the housing very well made sure there were no broken metal pieces any where. Then I applied silicone where the rear end meets the axle housing. Then I took the yoke off of the old rear end and put it on the new one and also I welded a hook to it. We slid it in with the forklift put long bolts to help align it and it slid right in. Pretty easy job but seems tough. I learned ways to make my life easier like welding a hook to the rear end and to use super long studs instead of small aligning studs. You don't have to fight with it. Here are some pictures!

Hoses

Today a driver came in saying that he is losing power when going up a hill. Turns out the air to air hose had a hole in it. The reason he is losing all power is because the air coming from the turbo is coming out of the hose. The driver is very lucky he caught that before it got way worse and that he was local. Also the other day I had a truck lose all its coolant and the driver had no clue because the sensor in the coolant tank had been taken out by someone driving the truck before him... I noticed something wrong due to all the smoke coming from the exhaust and puddle of coolant. Turns out the egr hose had a huge chunk missing out of it. I replaced both hoses by loosening the egr tank. Having little to no coolant in the truck might be the end of it. It smokes very bad constantly and runs at about 15 hundred rpm constantly. I don't yet know what the damage is but tomorrow we will further investigate. I learned that as a driver always do a pretrip if that driver had looked at his coolant level or notice that someone had taken the sensor out of the tank maybe that truck wouldn't have had all these other problems now. Here are some pictures....

Egr hose 

Air to air hose

Brake cans

Today one of our trailer was losing air cause of a bad brake can so I pulled into a rest area. I went out there to fix it by replace the brake can. But then I noticed the passenger side brake can had broken threw the face of the break can. The spring I think exploded so then I replaced it as well. Here is a picture of it....

Also at work I have been working to redo a drop axle so that it would go up faster. Right now we got a couple new trucks they all have the same problem with the drop axle being way to slow. So I'm trying to run hoses different ways to valves and from the tanks. I think I got it down in the next blog I will show how it all works.


Hours 337

Dash

One of our trucks dash was caving in because the back module broke. It was pretty easy hard part was remembering how it all went together. But I used zip ties and color markers to help me. Here is a picture of the dash after I pulled it all apart.

Here is a picture of it put back together with the new module.

I learned ways to help my self remember where everything goes and just practicing to reverse what I did to take the dash apart. It was a fun clean job and it turned out good.

U joint

Today I changed two U joints. There was about half an inch of play in the U Joints.  I used a bottle jack and a big punch to pop the caps from the U joints. I have changed U joints couple of times before so there wasn't much new but this time instead of struggling to hold the heavy drive shaft up then putting the caps in which takes two people I tried using a ratcheting strap to hold the drive shaft up. It worked out amazing! Here are some pictures!

That's how I used the strap. 

Hours around 290 

Muffler

Couple weeks ago we had a truck come that had a big banging sound every time the driver would accelerate. From how loud the banging noise was everyone in the shop thought it was something really bad. Well the foreman first wanted us to adjust the valves and the engine brake because it seemed to do the loud bang most when the engine brake hit. Well that didn't solve the problem. But the truck had gotten a new clutch put in couple weeks before, so foreman said pull the transmission out there is probably something wrong with that, a new clutch really didn't solve the problem. Well now the next thing he wanted to do was drain the rear end oil to see if there are any big chunks, they were good. So we sent it to another shop, they said the truck needs a new EGR so they threw a EGR at it. Still doesn't fix the problem. They tried some other things and that shop gave up. So i drove it back to the shop and i thought it was a good idea to just stand on the back of the truck have somebody drive in the yard going 5 MPH and see where the noise is coming from. And low and behold it was coming from the muffler. I took the muffler off drove it around the yard with out a muffler problem solved. That muffler costed $80the shop spent close to $10000 trying to figure out what is wrong. The biggest thing i learned from this is to stop and think back to the basics instead of thinking all these big problems and when someone just wants to through parts at a truck tell them why not to do that. Fixing something with sold evidence costs a lot less money as well. Here is are a couple pictures of the muffler.

N14 cummins putting the engine back together

Taking apart the N14 was a great experience. i got to learn a lot about how different systems work and how to find the right information needed to rebuild engines. For example, for Cummins its quick serve and reading all the N14 books. It was a lot of fun taking pistons out and turning the engine over to see the firing order. We did a lot of measurements to make sure everything is within specifications, which i will show in a picture down below. After that i started putting it back together and i was very thankful that when i dissembled the engine i bagged and tagged every bolt and part which made it a lot easier to reassemble the engine. I torqued everything to specifications by using the N14 book as well as adjusting the valve lash. Here are some pictures....

Pistons are out. 

There it shows one piston I pulled apart practicing how to do measurements. 

Connecting rod bushing that is definitely bad. 

I removed the cam shaft cover plate to measure the lobs 

Just a picture showing how I bagged everything to stay organized. 

I didn't really take very many pictures of putting everything back together because i got caught up in work but this picture is taken after putting the jakes back on. 

Finished project

All the measurements and the results. 

N14 disassembly

In school for the past couple days I got the chance to take apart a diesel engine. I choose the N14 Cummins. I went through the parts break down manual and today I took two pistons out. I was hoping I only had to take apart the back half of the motor and get my measurements but since I have to get measurements of the camshaft lobes I will need to disassemble the rest of the motor tomorrow. Which then the timing will be off and i will need to go into the N14 books and figure out how to do the timing again. Here are some pictures I will have many more blogs to come this is just the beginning. 

Took out the fuel cross over valves.

Took off the injector housing 

Took head number three off. 

Piston 6 and 5 are out. And in the back you can see i have made sure that everything is covered and everything is bagged and labeled. 

Exhaust Manifold Gasket Job.

Couple days ago I brought a truck in for an inspection and noticed there was a lot of black dust behind the exhaust manifold. I further inspected it and found that the gaskets on this Mercedes engine were most likely bad. So I ordered all of the parts from freightliner and luckily they had them in stock so by the time I pulled everything apart the parts showed up. Again i was alone at the shop working late so i had to think of everything on my own. The first problem I ran into was the turbo nuts where extremely tight. Two of the nuts came out when I put a three foot pipe on the end of my ratchet. But the other two at this point were pretty rounded off. I tried heating the nut up and it didn't work, So then I heated up the base of the turbo and exhaust manifold where they meet so that I could just try to remove it and the stud would just come out instead of the bolt coming loose. And this worked out well and I ended up replacing the studs. In two weeks I did two exhaust manifold jobs. The first job four bolts from the exhaust manifold broke which then I had to use an alignment block and reverse drill bits to extract the broken bolts. So this time I was very careful and I heated up the bolts before taking them off as best that i could to break the rust. It worked out well none of the bolts broke. The rest of the job went good I changed out the gaskets and fired up the truck took it for a test drive and there were no problems. Here are some pictures...

You want to make sure that arrow points up when reinstalling the gaskets

This how I realigned all the bolts and got the exhaust manifold mounted.