QUOTE: Originally posted by Overmod Weirdly enough, I would NOT have expected most of the crank breaks to be at the flywheel end. I'd have thought somewhere in between pairs of cylinders inducing the greatest mutual torsion... not working against flywheel inertia. I learn something every day from Randy... Where were most of the breaks on the 16-cylinder 244s? (I've always wanted to know that!) This isn't directly germane to *locomotive* crank breaks, but IIRC the breakage of GM truck diesel cranks is often somewhere other than at the rear main bearing. I read an account of one person with a 6.5TD who had a broken crank between the first and second pairs of cylinders. His complaint was that the engine ran a bit rough, and only seemed to make about 75% power... he was so right! Only the rear six cylinders were actually providing effective torque; the two in the front were mainly driving the auxiliaries; there was just enough interference between the two broken halves that they stayed in rough sync (think about how the injection pump wandered in and out of 'time' though, depending upon effective torsion... !)
QUOTE: Originally posted by O.S. Jruppert: I greatly appreciate your expertise in engines -- I'm learning a lot from you and Peter that isn't really obvious in the engineering texts. But -- you knew that would have to lead to a "but" -- I don't think that War Production Board restrictions were really anything more than an excuse invented by railfans years later to explain away the failure of their beloved Alco. If one looks at the historical record when it's written by historians who don't have a pre-existing agenda to absolve Alco, it seems clear that Alco's most serious problem was that EMD had been developing a diesel engine since the early 1930s, and Alco hadn't. It was a very new and high-risk technology, and Alco waited far too late to get started. By the time they did, EMD had made all the mistakes that Alco was still destined to make, and EMD had solved them and Alco didn't even know what they'd be yet. OS
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