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How can one school system have 21 of the same busses with the same 2 problems each? 3" hole in each engine & 3" hole in each frame.
2007 BlueBird Vision w/ Cat C7 230HP Diesel I thought Cat made good products. https://bids.cisauctions.com/auctions/29...ools%2C-MI
"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." - Thomas Jefferson
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Because that engine was the worst one they built. Prone to gasket leaks and metal shavings. Maintained by a non expert, it can blow a hole in the block. I saw one on display at a mechanic shop in Quartzite.
Compared to parenting, Cat herding is less complicated
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• Gr8ful (11-06-2020)
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I was driving one of those CAT engine buses when a fuel injector tip inside the cylinder broke off. The noise was awful, piston destroyed, rod bent, but no hole in the block. A coworker had the same problem but his had a 2 inch diameter hole in the side of the block. Much oil came out. Both were Thomas Built buses not Bluebird.
There is no routine maintenance to keep this from happening. There is no symptom or warning in advance. A similar CAT engine works fine in other applications. There's something special about the school bus version, maybe all road vehicle versions.
My school district also had a bunch of Mercedes diesels. They didn't have the same catastrophic failure, just a lot, many, countless, innumerable, multitudinous, never ending, expensive, exorbitant smaller failures that were never individually enough to justify junking the bus or the engine. The interminable, manifold, endless, parts and labor suckings and consumptions along with the recurrent and frequent down times were GOAT, Greatest Of All Time.
The best ones were the DT466, Detroit Diesel. They seemed to run, year after year, with few problems.
Of course, my favorite bus was bus number 937, the ancient one, the one bus old enough to drink. It had a mechanical fuel injector. It was only 390 cubic inches and the max speed of the bus was 55 MPH, as required by Florida law. There was no computer with a maximum speed setting. It was like acoustic instead of electric, analog not digital. Can you imagine if the revolutionary war had been called to order with fifes and drums that were digital or electric? We in North America would all be speaking British and spelling it colour and aluminium.
Say good night, Dick.