The Epic Cummins QSK60 Delvac Teardown

Hohn

Hohn

Joined
Jul 29, 2005
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Location
Diesel Central, Indiana
Thanks to some sleuthing from a colleague, I was able to obtain some photos of the famous 26k hour QSK60 excavator teardown. This engine burned 1.6 million gallons of fuel in a brutal 90% duty cycle excavator application. It was a premium GTL fuel and the oil used was Delvac, but supposedly a 0w-40 grade? Everyone agrees it was Delvac though. Circa 2015.


Gear wear:
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Geartrain thrust bearings:

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Gear Bushing.

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Bearings:

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Crank Journals:

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Note the immaculate camshaft in the background.
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Rod shows some expected fretting (this is a relentless duty cycle), but the piston is quite clean:

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NO fretting on the rod caps, machine marks still unmolested:
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Rod small ends like excellent:

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I wish I could get pictures of the piston bowls and the overhead as well as more pics of the general cleanliness. Unfortunately, this is all we could find.

This is fully 60% beyond the advertised life to overhaul. It's a testament to not only the excellent engineering in the Cummins QSK60, but also the superior performance of Delvac 1 in this infamously abusive application.
 
I might need to dig another swale or french drain. I suspect the left or right track alone could do the work and could skip the bucket. Thanks for sharing.
 
Rand said:
1600bar is ~~ 23000 psi or so for those math challenged.

69gal(standard) or 100gallon (option)
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The 69 gallon pans are much more common.

The oil filtration on these engine is either the Alfa Laval Eliminator (centrifuge) or a 30 micron spin on Fleetguard can. I'm not sure which this engine had. I'd be tempted to say spin-ons.

The eliminator is more common haul trucks.

The spin ons in this era would have only been 250 hours most commonly, so the Eliminator was an appealing option that could go 1000 hours. The problem is that the Eliminator takes hours to service (cleaning the centrifugal cone stack) vs the minutes it takes to replace spin ons. Plus the filtration of the spin ons is notably better. The eliminator uses mesh screens and centrifuge and has no actual fiber media per se.
 
Hohn said:
This is fully 60% beyond the advertised life to overhaul. It's a testament to not only the excellent engineering in the Cummins QSK60, but also the superior performance of Delvac 1 in this infamously abusive application.
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What do other engines run on other oils look like?

What is the relative difference you attribute to the oil as compared to engine design?
 
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Quite a dusty environment as well. Very impressive.

There is some normal wear in the bearing shells. This is an excellent example of wear during operation, as these units do not see a lot of cold starts. These are started, warmed up and run for long days.
 
Very cool and totally impressive!! Playing the odds. A couple of those bearings were on their way out. Beating the odds it’s likely to need fewer parts for the rebuild. Thanks for the interesting post!
 
crashz said:
Quite a dusty environment as well. Very impressive.

There is some normal wear in the bearing shells. This is an excellent example of wear during operation, as these units do not see a lot of cold starts. These are started, warmed up and run for long days.
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An excavator is the most important piece of equipment at the mine site. If a haul truck goes down,it’s a big loss of ore productivity. But if the shovel goes down, you effectively take out many haul trucks at once. It’s much bigger still.

Even ultra class haul trucks are 400 tons. It takes about 5 scoops of a Hitachi EX8000 to fill such a truck. That’s typically just a couple minutes whereas the haul trucks might have a 40 min drive or longer.

Downtime on an mega-excavator under some conditions can represent millions of dollars a day in lost revenue. Do the math on $80 per ton for Bauxite, for example. That means each 75 ton scoop of the shovel is moving about $5500 worth of dirt/ore. And since it can do a scoop about every 30 seconds, that adds up to an hourly lost production value of about $660k/hr.

Now you know why they plan the maintenance and downtime VERY carefully.
 
Thanks for the pictures! You cannot see them anywhere else.
I'm afraid this thread will turn even more people to use diesel oil in their gasoline vehicles and farm equipment. Maybe they should know the engine has 69 gal. oil capacity, possibly oil radiator, and doesn't run over 1,500 rpm (I'm guessing).
 
Good explanation Hohn! I'm curious, what do the mine owners do when the engines come in for a tear down? Does the engine get rebuilt and stored on a shelf (assuming a new or rebuilt engine is in the machine already)? Do they just go with a new engine?
 
crashz said:
Good explanation Hohn! I'm curious, what do the mine owners do when the engines come in for a tear down? Does the engine get rebuilt and stored on a shelf (assuming a new or rebuilt engine is in the machine already)? Do they just go with a new engine?
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In regards to the mines I have worked for, downtime is minimized, so if an excavator or haul truck needs an engine then there are rebuilts on the shelf ready to go. Swap them out and send the old unit for rebuild, then it is back on the shelf for the next time. Most mines are really good about knowing the life of a machine and as such schedule major rebuilds eg. they know the life of an engine in an excavator generally last 20000 hours so they would schedule an engine change at say 18000 hours(not real numbers just an example). Our shop had an engine, transmission, rear axle and hydraulic pumps on the shelf as part of the service contract.
 
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