Caterpillar 246. When is a CAT, really a Perkins? Replacing CAT 3034 motor with a Perkins 704-30

hello youtube um i'm gonna do a little video here on a caterpillar 246 skid steer it's kind of buried in the uh shop here tough to get a good picture of it but those of you that are probably watching this video and know what a skid steer looks like anyway this one was converted to the logger in uh track system we bought it with a broken connecting rod uh there's some of the carnage there some of the other pieces there one of those crank shafts back there belongs to this motor uh the reason for the video this is an early 2000 uh machine model year 2000 and these engines are not that common anymore and caterpillar depending on which dealer you talk to they either will tell you it's nla for no longer available or they will tell you that it's very expensive in the tune of like 12 000 expensive um this is the cat 3034 series engine i think the group family is 147-1234 when in reality this is a perkins engine um i believe if the internet is correct caterpillar bought perkins back in 1998 for three billion dollars or something like that but uh but i believe that caterpillar perkins still produced engines for entities other than caterpillar after that um so what you have here is an engine that if you talk to caterpillar they would tell you it's a 3034 or a 147-1234 but it is also a perkins 704 704-30 t in this case because it's a turbocharged application so that's where the plot kind of thickens um perkins made two different variations of the 704-30 t one was a naturally aspirated application and one was turbocharged like what came in this cat skid steer the naturally aspirated ones this particular core engine came out of a uh daewoo skid steer uh 60 horsepower whereas the turbocharged uh version of it it's a 80 horsepower so you're left kind of scratching your head with caterpillar here because the options are pretty limited to be quite honest i didn't believe when i bought this machine that um i would have this heart of time finding an engine for it i bought it with the intention of fixing it and using it on a project we got going building a house and a shop kind of what we do we buy things broken and we fix them but probably if i'd done a little more research on this particular application i don't know if i would have still bought it because of the difficulty getting parts for it um having said that the reason for today's video i wanted to go over the solution we came up with um obviously that block is no good when it broke the connecting rod obviously it put a hole in the block um this cylinder lost oil this picture is not going to show up very well but this cylinder is just totally wiped out but more than that you know you could maybe bore this and put a huge pipe plug in it and you could sleeve that cylinder but more than that it's spun number two crank bearing uh main bearing that's kind of what particip precipitated the whole incident was number two bearing spun number two cylinder star for oil um and then obviously it broke so when the crank when the rod broke it also got up into the water jacket and cracked the water jacket so those are the last two strikes against saving this block one was the spun bearing on the main saddle and the other one was the water jackets are broken so it's kind of a scrap at that point so the way we overcame it was we use this serial number right here off the block or casting number three i can't read it i think it's three seven one or three seven four one one zero three a forward slash four um i called the local engine supply company rf engines their website is diesel cranks they kind of specialize in equipment engines they told me they would get back with me after they looked through their inventory they called back and they said yeah we have got uh these engines here with the almost identical casting number on the block except for the last digit that last digit being a one instead of a four so i loaded i loaded that block in my truck and i drove out there to look at the two engines that they had this one and another one they were different um the first differences i noticed were the turbo drain back hole the oil hole coming out of the turbo on the turbo application it drains into here on this engine block that was a normally or naturally aspirated block the emboss is there but the hole is not a similar situation on the other side there's a pretty extensive crankcase ventilation system on this it draws from here and it drains back down here i'm sorry i hit the camera wrong drains back down here again the naturally aspirated application did not have those two features you can see the emboss is here for the drain but there's no tapped hole um there was the same situation here this hole was not here i just drilled that in yesterday i probably could give you a picture but you get the idea it looked very similar to this there was a cast pad there but the hole wasn't there wasn't an easy hole to drill you can see i don't know if you can see or not let me see if i can find a flashlight real quick there's a plastic baffle on the inside of that uh on the inside of the high pressure fuel pump cavity there that black baffle that screws into that that baffle doesn't have a lot of room next to that cast wall back there took a bit of fiddling around to get it laid out correctly but i got it it's in this feature down here my plan is to just put a bulk head in the oil pan down below to let the positive crank case vent drain uh bulkhead similar to that bulkhead similar to this we'll just drill a hole in the pan and you know put this nut on the inside probably tack weld it to the pan on the inside and then run that drain back into here caterpillar had that drain below the oil level this is the tube that threaded into the block here and this extended all the way down to the oil pan so they obviously want this below the oil level whereas if we put a bulkhead in the pan that'll be below the oil level the turbo drain here is above the oil level now if you notice where it broke the block there was a threaded port there so i think i'm going to re-route the turbo drain to that same threaded port on this motor here so instead of coming here the oil will drain out of the turbo just come down do maybe a 45 and a 45 and get over to here sorry about the camera work um so those are the three physical differences that i noticed when i inspected the engine on the outside when i made the decision to buy this short block rotating assembly from rf engines this got me a block it got me a good crank it got me a good set of rods which obviously i didn't have with that engine so i thought i was well on my way to getting this skid steer put back together uh 750 dollars for that short block including a rotating assembly the rebuild kit from highway and heavy was a thousand um machine work cylinder head is there the uh you've already seen the block you know i think i had like 400 bucks in the machine work so i thought i was well on my way to getting it put back together but i don't have a good picture of this let me stop this and get a picture of it and i'll well i can show you what i didn't know when i first inspected these these are the oil galleys you can see this is where your oil filter would go this is the oil pressure sending unit this is the line that feeds the turbocharger here so what you see here is the end of the oil galley there's one two three or one two three oil galleys here this oil galley feeds the piston cooling jets that are uh i can't really see them but you have to trust me they're they're mounted up in the bottom of the block on each cylinder and on the turbocharged application they spray oil on the inside of the dome of the piston once the um piston or once the oil pressure reaches a certain level the they look something like this their cooling jet uh they're mounted with a banjo fitting like this that banjo fitting banjo bolt is a 3 8 24 and it has a check ball in it so once the oil pressure gets to a certain level this opens allowing oil to flow through here and this squirts oil up on the inside of the piston unfortunately i found out after i got halfway through this endeavor with rebuilding the engine this block has the two lower oil galleys but the upper one was never drilled at the factory i actually had sent this block out with the incorrect assumption that those cooling jets were tapped into this galley and the machine shop it was a separate machine shop from who did the the rebuild type machining they drill they spot face the locations to mount the cooling jets and once they drilled the holes for the 3 8 24 bolt they didn't hit anything it didn't break into this cooling pass or this oil passage like i thought it would upon closer inspection the oil passage that it should have broke into was here and this block is not equipped with that um so i'm not going to be able to use the piston cooling jets uh i know there's a lot of different ways it could be attacked this is a personal use machine it's not going back into like company service it's just my own personal machine the gentleman that did the secondary machining on the cooling jets is pretty well known in the performance community uh you can look him up on facebook or whatever his mountain machine they do a lot of 12-valve cummins work he just said don't worry about it put an egt gauge on it keep an eye on the egts and run it you know if it starts getting hot cool it down that's sort of what i do with my duramax truck so that's what i'm going to do um i'm going to proceed with the rebuild install some gauges so i can kind of monitor the motor but uh the reason i wanted to make this video is to let you know if you've got one of these early cat 246 skid steers and you you end up in a situation like this where you got a catastrophic failure if you want there is another option you can do what i'm doing and build an engine from a daewoo skid steer or they put these engines in hyster fork trucks they put these engines in oh several different things i don't know what all they put them in but perkins you know still sold these engines on the open market uh you can look for that casting number what do i do with that flashlight or if you're just looking for the perkins number you know there's that's going to show up or not i apologize can't seem to get the light right but there's the perkins tag and right here you'll notice this this engine family number starts with the ua on the turbocharged application this engine family would start with a uc i had no luck finding a uc block so i'm gonna do the best i can with the ua you'll notice the position of that tag is the exact same position the caterpillar puts their tag that calls this the 3034 or a1471234 engine family um [Music] so that's why i'm making the video there are options for you cat the one dealer that i found that said they could get me this engine totally rebuilt from cat it was like a twelve thousand dollar price tag with a five 000 core i know those numbers seem crazy but that is what i was quoted and that was just the one dealer that said they could get it the other dealer said they couldn't even get it five thousand dollar core and if your block had a hole in it they kept uh i think they kept two thousand dollars of your core so it went from being a twelve thousand dollar purchase to being a fourteen thousand dollar purchase which for a twenty year old skid steer was just crazy for me i was never going to do that so going this route paid 750 for the short block with a rotating assembly i paid a thousand dollars for parts i've got four well actually the failed piston cooling jets was another 300 so i've got about 700 into machine work on that block and cylinder head and crank um so for under 3 500 bucks this will be running and moving again um yes it would have been great to be able to get a uc block where i could use the cooling jets obviously once i get it up and running i can if there's interest in this i can recap if the egts seem to go high if if i thought that not using the cooling jets was a bad idea i can come back and revisit that but that's what i'm going to do maybe this video helps somebody maybe it doesn't we're going to start building this engine tonight we just got it back from the machine shop a few days ago we got this hole drilled that was a bit of a nail biter because you obviously only get one shot at it we made a cold roll insert here this wasn't here on the uc motor switch these around on the cap motor the around the perkins motor this was up here and the oil cooler oil filter was here so i switched those around i added the feed line for the turbocharger for over here so the differences between the two engines have been addressed to the best of my ability so i'm going to go ahead and build the engine or rebuild the engine as uh normally would and uh i'll keep you posted if there's any interest but it is a much more economical way to get a older 246 back up and going than uh than fourteen thousand dollars for a replacement engine from cat um this does have the track system on it it does have a brand new set of tracks the life of the undercarriage is not as nice as the tracks obviously those were put on you know they put the system on they wore a set of tracks out they put another set of tracks on so you know the undercarriage life is not the same as the tracks but it was a concrete company that owned this before i got it they had it serviced through michigan cat here in southeast michigan i got the service records it got a lot of new hydraulic parts uh since 2016 uh drive motor on the left side new turbocharger several oil leaks were fixed there was other stuff that michigan cat had done to this so those are the reasons i decided go ahead and save it pretty extensive service at cap fairly recent it is a high hour machine but you know there's been a lot of service done to it it's been converted to tracks a property that i'm on is uh clay gets muddy and slimy really easy so i wanted a track machine not a wheel machines if i could didn't have the money to spend on a newer track machine this seemed like a good compromise so that is the route i went um i have made a video in probably seven or eight years so i just thought this might help some people comment if you want me to do a follow-up on um if i think that omitting the piston cooling jets turned out to be a bad idea thank you very much and comment if you want more feedback or more follow-up thanks have a great day

Channel: Mike S

Views: 6,664

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Id: s4h1G0ec0dY

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021