I'm looking into setting up a way to prelube the main and conn rod bearings on the 539 engine in McDonald Steel 777. I am wondering if anyone has set up such an arrangement on a 539 and if so, how was it done?

I'm thinking of using a gear pump powered by the batteries for the prelube, pumping into one of the oil lines that runs into the oil cooler which feeds into the CUNO strainer and then into the crankcase. The thing I cannot figure out is how to draw oil out of the crankcase. The lube oil pump and its suction line are sealed units which I don't want to mess with.

I also have to check to see if oil would flow backwards through the engine's lube oil pump back into the crankcase instead of going to the crankshaft, which would defeat the purpose.

Any advice would be appreciated.

The emergency generators in my plant constantly circulate warmed oil and coolant so they will be immediately ready for service. There are some good commercial products just for this purpose available, Kem Hotstart comes to mind....... I'll bet you can finds a unit used fairly cheaply. Just where to tap in is the question on the 539 block.

dave

This loco has a Kim Hotstart for the cooling water, or at least it did. It froze and cracked and I'm not sure it can be repaired.

Shouldn't be that difficult to 'gin up a replacement for the broken parts.

Remember that a Hotstart will only heat the coolant, and not the oil directly. I would want to put in a system that heats the oil in the sump, like a light-diesel pan heater, without introducing the risk that coolant might seep or leak into the sump; as you know, I don't really favor the idea of using an oil-to-water cooler like the one on the VT365 'control oil' circuit...

Here is a video that covers quite a few of the details (some rather simplistic, but necessary for safety) of setting up one of these things.

http://www.hotstart.com/en/home/PlayYouTubeVideo/447

I would think a combination of circulating pump and tankless water heater would neatly substitute for the busted parts if you think they're beyond repair; this would automatically give you the ability to control the system both from a 'local' limit thermostat and a remote thermostat for minimum assured temperature.

I would note that your engine will not be using 'antifreeze' for coolant, so the radiator should also be kept above freezing when full; contrary to what the video implies, you will want at least some controlled circulation through the radiator sections even if they are not kept at full 'block temperature'.

I used the main oil drain for the suction side when prelubing our S1. Also had a 5 gal bucket to drain any condensate first before hooking up the fittings.

We used a 74v electric fuel pump in one case... This is basically the electric fuel pump assembly off another locomotive. We used in another case a gas engine driven pump. In both cases we opened a crankcase cover and dropped the suction line into the oil. Cleanliness is imprtant if you do that.

If you hard plumb it, add a check valve and be careful about routing so you don't inadvertently create a siphon.

Thanks for the advice so far.

I'm not so concerned about heating the coolant, as the loco would be operated only during fair weather during the tourist season. If its too cold to start the loco, then its time to winterize.

Ed, I guess I didn't think of using the main oil drain. That is an option. I would probably want to throw a filter in there just to be on the safe side. Where did you feed back into the oil system at?

Ideally I would like to set up a prelube system that is simple to use, so that it would actually get used every time the locomotive is started. It does no good to make it so cumbersome to setup and use that 99% of the time it is not used and the engine is started on dry bearings.

What we wanted to do, and never did, was hard plumb it in, and then put it on a switch in between "control" and "fuel pump" in the startup process. It will never raise any oil pressure, but will at least pre-fill the galleries with oil so pressure comes up immediately.

Also the drip lubrication it puts on the bearings will help greatly; oil is designed to provide lubrication when merely present and not under pressure, as it does in the compressor, most lawnmowers, and every journal ever.

Rick- I used a hand pump for oil from a farm store. I attached the output by the front of the engine(by the radiators) on the engineer side. I removed a small hose, probably about 3/8" and prelubed it through there. It did a good job of lubricating the crankshaft but did not get oil up to the rockers.

Why can't you use antifreeze in one of these engines? I understand 'thats a lotta coolant!' but it wouldn't be near as expensive as freeze damage or corrosion damage.

Kim Hotstart is alive and well. Most of their units work by thermosyphon, very easy to use. They are not all THAT expensive. A V type unit would best use two, one on each bank. My experience is that they can warm a cold engine up pretty quickly, and the main benefit is they warm the cylinders up for better starting and faster cranking speed (less drag on the rings). They would also pratically eliminate condensation. However, a locomotive could use many hundreds of dollars a month in electricity to keep it warm.....

As far as not getting the loading the engine needs to stay healthy, why not load bank the engines? I work as a generator tech and load banking is very common to generators, they have the same issue, most of their run time is at very low power levels. If generator can make something approximating 480vac 3 phase 60 hz, it would be a cinch. The load bank we have at the shop can do 650kw, close to 900 horsepower, all day long. With a little notice I can get a bigger load bank, up to 2mw (nearly 2700 horsepower), and they can be combined as many as you want for however big you need.

We've worked with a couple of 539(T) engines at a museum. They were both set up to receive pre-lube oil at a point near the back of the block, right side, about waist high. There is a 1/2", or so, line that connects the turbo and the engine block. Both of our engines had a tee pipe fitting with a pipe plug - just pull the plug and pump oil in there.

I would respectfully discourage drawing oil from the sump drain. Any material that has precipitated out of the oil will reside there, and usually it's bad: Think water, dirt, sludge, metal particles. When you draw "bad stuff" from there, and use it to pre-lube, that will be the first oil that your dry bearings will see before a startup. I would respectfully urge you to draw from near the top of the oil supply. Or even better, draw 5 or 10 gallons off the bottom, throw it away, and pump 5-10 new gallons in.

When pre-lubing, there are several places to check for proper feedback that the oil is getting where it needs to go:

1) Drop the crankcase covers, and see that all of the mains and piston pins are dripping oil
2) Pull the rocker box covers, and see that they all are spewing oil (there's a fitting on the rocker arms for this purpose)
3) Crack open the return line from the turbo, and make sure the oil is returning from the turbo
4) Just keep an eye on the pressure gauge in the cab.

JR

Money used for the lots of expensive coolant could possibly have been spent on something else ... and plain water cools better than the usual glycol mixtures. PCook can probably comment on the inhibitor packages EMD used for corrosion.

Meanwhile, you need to be careful with glycol coolant around some kinds of heater, notably the sort of cheap 'block heater' or freeze-plug heater that used to be provided on diesel vehicles. These slowly (but fairly surely) can degrade the glycol by spot-overheating. You can't burn water...



This means that the 'intake' to the heater is down low, and the exit as high as possible, so the coolant naturally rises coming out of the heater and induces circulation without mechanical pumping. This eliminates both the danger of a seized pump leading to freeze damage and the need for some mechanical power source (the early Hotstarts I was familiar with used diesel fuel in burners and did not need either line or battery electrical power to work)




I worry that it might be possible to warm an engine like a 539 up TOO quickly, especially in very cold temperatures if the 'thermosyphon' circulation doesn't extend to most of the water passages. There is probably an ideal maximum rise in degrees per minute for a given family of diesel engines, and this may be different for different temperature ranges. While this is not as extreme a situation as firing up a steam boiler quickly, I think it deserves some consideration.




You could always make up a blanket or insulation panels to go around the engine to hold heat in. In Europe, the modified 2-10-0 8055 is well enough insulated that an electric element of no more than 35kW can hold full steam pressure indefinitely. There are now better high-performance insulating materials.

Quite a few designs of Hotstart do not run on electricity; the earliest versions I saw were fired using diesel fuel. (Electricity is now much cheaper per kilowatt!)

Two notes, thinking about Mr. Redden's post:

He noted:



Just to be clear, he meant 'pump the replacement oil directly in through the preluber', not back into the bottom of the sump to replace what you drew off from there. There's a lot to be said for using clean, warm oil in the prelubing system at all times...


The other thing he noted was to take special pains to guarantee full lubrication of turbocharger bearings before the rotor starts to turn, and thereafter as long as necessary before the engine's oil system provides assured lube pressure and volume to the turbo. I am of the opinion that you should consider a POST-lube system for the turbocharger, probably of the gas-charged reservoir type, which would continue to give positive flow through the turbocharger bearings (particularly the interstage bearing between the impeller and turbine) in the several minutes after the engine has wound down from high power and there is risk of coking. Perhaps some variant of a 'turbo timer' might be useful to install.

John Redden, thanks for the tip on the oil port at the turbo. I'll check that out tomorrow.

Just thinking out loud, but what about installing a bypass filtering system with a high efficiency filter, and in the line between the filter and the discharge back into the crankcase put a small reservoir. Draw the prelube oil from that reservoir. It would always be the cleanest oil available, and would eliminate the problem of finding a way to extract oil from the crankcase without going through the engine drain or cutting holes in the crankcase covers. The reservoir could be heated if desired, so that prelube oil is already thinned down to the correct viscosity.

Excellent tip on where to connect to feed oil in on a 539. From experience with 567 engines and GE 70-tonners with Cooper-Bessemer engines, I offer what we did in South Dakota without an enginehouse. The GE's were equipped with a hand operated oil pump to pre-lube the Diesel and turbo before starting. The operator's manual stressed that the engine should be pre-lubed before every cold startup. I talked with a fellow on a Texas shortline years ago, who told me the engineer was lax about doing the pre-lube until he came in the shop to say there was something wrong with the engine. Bearings had failed. On the EMD's, when we had air available, we would pump fresh oil from a barrel with an air-operated barrel pump. We installed a T-connection on the output line from the engine driven oil pump. Opening the top deck cover, we would watch to see oil begin to drip around the camshaft bearings at the accessory end. If no air was available, we did it with a hand operated barrel pump. You can buy them at any farm supply store.

As to anti-freeze, an experienced shop foreman advised me to use the same thing that was used by automobile owners before glycol anti-freeze, a 50-50 mix of water and methanol (aka wood alcohol). Methanol is cheap and available in 55 gallon drums from your fuel supplier. It will tend to boil out over the summer. My suggestion is go to the local library and Xerox the chart in a chemistry textbook that shows the specific gravity of various percentage mixes of methanol and water and the corresponding freezing point. You will need to buy a couple of hydrometers that read less than 1.0 which is the specific gravity of water. Why a couple? Expect someone to break one. Ask me how I know. The hydrometers are fairly long. We made up an ersatz test tube of white PVC pipe and glued an appropriate cap on the end. We would crack the locomotive's water drain to fill the pipe and float the hydrometer in it. Low tech but it worked for twenty-five years.

DO NOT mix methanol with glycol. Flush the engine completely before changing from one to the other. I am reliably told that if you don't the resulting mix is green Jello.

Methanol will protect a shut down engine from freeze-up in a South Dakota winter. However, with 40-weight lube oil in the engine, it must be preheated before the oil pump tries to push it through the oil lines. Again, ask me how I know. What we did successfully was take a common stock tank heater available at all farm supply stores, take off a crankcase inspection cover and toss the heater element into the lube oil. With the heater plugged in, we let the engine sit overnight to warm up. In addition, we would take a Nipco heater, a local term for a kerosene fired heater with a fan to blow hot exhaust onto the oil cooler and around the engine block to some extent. This was part of the overnight warmup procedure. With the multi-viscosity oils that are now available for large Diesels, there is less need to pre-heat the lube oil.

Alex Huff