CK35 HST shattered piston at 400 hours

[Coyote machine]

I'm not relying on memory on this one: do we know if the mech added the oil back through the top end , or did he pour it back into the pan then 'crazy glue' the pan back on, (to keep it from leaking).:confused2::laughing:

There's got to be some humor added to this thread, agreed....

 

[CenTex Chris]

The CK35 is back at the dealership. They used a forklift to raise the FEL arms and to pull the tractor off the trailer. Gonna give 'em a week before I call back to find out where they are with disassembly and evaluation.

 

[Coyote machine]

That's good news that they aren't starting it anymore. Hopefully they will get right on it for you.

 

[SPYDERLK]

I wonder what neighbour did in an hour or two that you did not in 400hours. Big question is why did neighbour keep driving it at the first hint of trouble ?
Is it past the stage of a farmer fix with a sleeve, piston and rod?

He ran it for the 401 hr. A latent defect matured.

 

[SPYDERLK]

Has anybody mentioned yet that neighbour may have ran the tractor out of fuel and started it on ether until it primed ?

,,,,Yes. OP says not likely.

 

[sd455dan]

Yep. That beats all I've ever heard. Maybe he was in shock from seeing a piston skirt shatter. I know I might be since in all my days I've never seen one do that. I showed the pics to my chief welder at the shop today. 30 years building race cars it was a first for him as well.

There must be a few of us that have seen a shattered piston skirt before... had a 1964 GTO with over 100k miles on the original 389 that ran fine and one day starting it and heard a noise . the engine ran normally after the initial noise but you could feel the engine was no longer in balance. pulled the engine and sure enough one piston looked a lot like the Kiotis except that the fracture did not extend into the piston pin or ring area .
After some inspection and measuring- the bores were found to be out of round .007 and worse the average bore had worn .038 inch.
Had to have the block bored a full .060 to (clean) the cylinder bores.
Obviously not the cause of the Kioti failure.

Will be interested to see what Kiotis determination is.
And Still hoping this incident has been passed on to engineering... I really think they would want to see this.

 

[Fawken]

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.

 

[SPYDERLK]

There must be a few of us that have seen a shattered piston skirt before... had a 1964 GTO with over 100k miles on the original 389 that ran fine and one day starting it and heard a noise . the engine ran normally after the initial noise but you could feel the engine was no longer in balance. pulled the engine and sure enough one piston looked a lot like the Kiotis except that the fracture did not extend into the piston pin or ring area .
After some inspection and measuring- the bores were found to be out of round .007 and worse the average bore had worn .038 inch.
Had to have the block bored a full .060 to (clean) the cylinder bores.
Obviously not the cause of the Kioti failure.

Will be interested to see what Kiotis determination is.
And Still hoping this incident has been passed on to engineering... I really think they would want to see this.

Amazing how fast the cylinders wore on those old car engines. Even hi revving motorcycle engines didnt wear like that.

 

[Fawken]

Amazing how fast the cylinders wore on those old car engines. Even hi revving motorcycle engines didnt wear like that.

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.

 

[sd455dan]

Amazing how fast the cylinders wore on those old car engines. Even hi revving motorcycle engines didnt wear like that.

Yeah- that particular block must have been a little short on nickel.:laughing: Have had several other GM blocks that didn't wear anything like that one pontiac block. It did not smoke or knock.

Hopefully a decision in the OPs favor will be forthcoming

 

[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.