CK35 HST shattered piston at 400 hours

[sd455dan]

The guy at work has shown me some pistons (Blue Max Racing) and I asked, "Gosh, how many races did you get out of that?" His reply: just one. The engine lasts for one race only. Expensive hobby if you ask me. Now he's brought in pistons that were warped, looked melted, broke in half, a hole blown through the top, but never one with just the skirt shattered.

Racing engines generally use Forged pistons - much harder to shatter a skirt- than a cast aluminum piston ( the GTO)
just punched in search terms -shattered piston skirt here plenty of other damage to
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=Shattered+Piston+Skirt+Pictures&fr=crmas


Interesting that the Kioti took out the wrist pin area to- don't see any that didn't also have rod damage.

 

[Amvcane]

I also hope Kioti engineering gets involved with this, along with their piston supplier. Just speculating, but for all we know there could be many shattered Kioti pistons throughout the world in tractors, sailboats, generators, etc. ,with no explanation. The pictures and broken parts that Chris has show the cause of the failure.

 

[Leejohn]

I have seen it happen a number of times, it was not that uncommon.

 

[Fawken]

I also hope Kioti engineering gets involved with this, along with their piston supplier. Just speculating, but for all we know there could be many shattered Kioti pistons throughout the world in tractors, sailboats, generators, etc. ,with no explanation. The pictures and broken parts that Chris has show the cause of the failure.

I did a search for just Daedong piston failures when this thread first started and didn't find a single one. I would not lose a minute of sleep over it if I owned a Kioti.

 

[DK35vince]

I would not lose a minute of sleep over it if I owned a Kioti.

I certainly won't.

 

[DuckSlayer1017]

I have never seen a skirt shatter. Usually if the cylinder is that far out of spec you can hear a god-awful clatter and you'll see a whole lot of blow-by at minimum. The long part of the skirt is prevented from contacting the cylinder by the restraint of the wrist pin. In short, it is virtually impossible for that damage to have been the result of contact between components in that crankcase. edited to add: I personally do not see any benefit to Kioti engineering to study this case. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design of this engine. It was a one in ten-thousand, hidden defect that left the factory. Maybe they could hydro the pistons before assembly, but even that wouldn't help if it was damaged during assembly and would only add to the cost.

Kioti design engineers might not care if this is really is a extremely rare failure. However, it should go back for inspection because the manufacturing engineers definitely need to figure out how this happened and made it into the field.

 

[sd455dan]

Updates?? Inquiring minds

 

[PILOON]

My comments are that this is one of the more levelheaded discussions of a serious failure that I have followed on TBN in a while.
That especially applies to the OP and as such I wish him a favorable outcome.

My guess is that he will be satisfied with what Kioti comes up with as a solution as they have more to gain than lose.
Their main problem is to not set precedents that they can't live with so there could be some sort of compromise solution offered like free parts but not labor in which case the dealer can always step in with labor at cost.
In either case both gain excellent PR.

To the OP, stay cool, be patient and best of luck.

 

[maximus1277]

I definitely picked up a few "best practices" reading this thread and I do hope that Kioti will stand behind this issue. I will certainly pay close attention to the outcome and keep it in mind when buying my next tractor.

 

[ritcheyvs]

I haven't posted here previously because it seemed others had greater expertise and experience in this specific area. But many of us have followed this quietly but with great interest; there have been over 10,000 views of this thread so far.