The FORD Lounge

[Clutch47]

Thought ya'll might get a kick out of something I saw yesterday.
 A Benz of some vintage that needed the attention of the youngest wrench turner in my friends business.
  The mock up block has a nice window in the front if you look. FNG said he shifted to 3rd at about 3300 and the balancer along with the front of the crank fell out onto the road. Crank broke at #2 and FODded the roadway... so the Mustang donated the mock up engine.
 They're figuring out how to do a legal exhaust now.
Motor mounts are after that.. 🤣

[ArdWrknTrk]

Jeez.
Some people's kids...  🙄

[Gary Lewis]

The balancers on some of the Benz V6's were known to walk off and cause quite a bit of excitement, but hadn't heard about breaking the crank.  Ouch!

[Nothing Special]

When I worked in an engine test lab at General Motors (and yes, I drove a Ford truck to work), once I was looking into a dyno cell through the window and saw the harmonic balancer coming off an engine that was at about 6500 rpm.  I yelled at the tech to shut it down.  He hit the e-stop button which turned the 600 hp DC dyno into a 600 hp electric motor trying to turn the engine backward.  I couldn't believe how far that engine torqued over!  No way I'd have thought the motor mounts would allow that much motion!

But we were too late, the balancer did come off.  For what seemed like about 5 minutes (but was probably closer to 5 seconds) we listened to it bang off everything it could find.  The bangs started coming farther apart, and as we waited to see if we had heard the last bang I had an image in my head from a Roadrunner cartoon, where the balancer was sitting there, spinning, waiting for us to open the door so it could take a run at us as soon as we opened the door!

[ArdWrknTrk]

And that's the reason test cells are bulletproof....  😱

[Gary Lewis]

Yikes!  I can only imagine!  Those balancers are heavy, and spinning at 6500 R's would make them very dangerous.  

[Nothing Special]

Yes!  And the window I was looking through was double-paned bulletproof glass, set in the wall at a 45° angle, so anything flying into it would be deflected to the floor rather than giving a direct hit to the glass.  The fire suppression system in the dyno rooms was pretty serious too!

[Clutch47]

Your description of the cartoon version of the story makes me laugh..
 All I can see is the Tasmanian Devil cartoon. The little tornado stops and its actually a balancer...looking for its next victim.🤣
  This young man's story about his crank doing a disc Defrag isn't the first time I've heard of the early HO engines letting the crank leave the party early before that main cap.  I'd suspect it's because of all the contributing unbalanced and unaccounted for forces happening before that main cap.
Fuel pump eccentric comes to mind along with timing set and oil pump/distributor all making different vibrations.
   Who knows.... 🤷‍♂️

[mat in tn]

I bought my flareside a few years back with an engine knock. once the tow truck delivered it, we started looking into it.  it turned out to be the outer ring had come loose and beat a hole in the timing cover. I fixed enough to be able to test drive through the subdivision a bit and prove the rest of the truck. once done I put in another used engine from stock and rebuilt the engine. last week we visited our son on base, and he was saying his foxbody had a knock. we looked it over and sure enough the outer ring was wobbling all over but was still along for the ride. I told him to shut it off and replace the damper before starting it again! I would NOT be surprised if he drove the 250 miles to fix it here. haha

[Gary Lewis]

Don't be surprised if you get a call from the side of the road.  

[mat in tn]

AGAIN! hahahahah

[ArdWrknTrk]

After my 'accident' in 1984, I worked at Westinghouse, selling time on their satellites.
The full halon systems there would snuff you if you didn't make it out the door in time.   💀

[Nothing Special]

The system in the GM test labs when I was there was carbon dioxide.  The lines would be purged with air after any time they were used or tested, so when the system was triggered you had several seconds warning as the system screamed while blowing air on the fire (I guess that was a little exciting too!).  Then the CO2 would get there and you didn't want to be in the room!

Also the doors were spring loaded closed, and there were CO2 pipes you could hook them open on.  When the system was pressurized a plunger would be pushed out, popping the chain off so the door would automatically swing closed.

Shortly after I started there we had a safety training.  One of the managers told us about a time he had seen someone go down in a cell from the CO2.  He took a deep breath and went in to pull the guy out.  

Turns out an interesting thing about the human body is that it doesn't really care how much oxygen is in your lungs, it cares about how much CO2 is there.  If the CO2 concentration gets too high there's an involuntary response to exhale.  As he was pulling the other guy out he sucked in a little CO2.  Even though he still had a lot of oxygen left, his body decided to get rid of the CO2 and he exhaled all of his oxygen.

The next thing he knew both of them were coming to after someone with an oxygen mask had pulled them both out!

[ArdWrknTrk]

The satellite uplink room had gates that slammed down 6 seconds after the alarm sounded.
There was no coming back from that.

At least it wouldn't burn your lungs out with carbonic acid... 🥺

[Clutch47]

Reminds me of different kinds of fire suppression systems I saw in my Navy tour.
 Did my share of working with LOX converters, chest and panel mounted regulators and testing LOX samples.
   Thankfully never had fire to deal with.

[85lebaront2]

I have had the outer ring on a 460 balancer come loose, but the most interesting one was the 1978 GM 5.7L Diesel that suddenly developed a knock, still ran fairly well, but I had a spare so swapped engines. Pulled it out and found that I could move the flex plate a bit before the balancer moved.

I assumed it was a bad flex plate, but when I pulled the engine there was no evidence. Pulled the pan and found the crank was broken just behind the 5-6 crank throw. Carried the pieces in to work and found a fatigue starter crack.

[Gary Lewis]

Those things almost scared the American public away from diesels with their problems.  

[85lebaront2]

Ok, I finally got the Titanic engine finished. Here are the pictures of the completed model:

[Gary Lewis]

Nice!  That thing was massive!  (I guess "is massive" is more accurate as it still exists, albeit somewhat hard to get to.)

[ArdWrknTrk]

It's keeping you occupied.
How's your back?