Dieseling Backwards

[scott_vt]

Hi Rob,
Dont know how much more I could add to this thread, the other guys have pretty much covered all the bases.

Years ago, we had a 1972 Seagrave pumper in our volunteer fire dept. Well to make a long story short, I believe it had a Detroit diesel also. One of the fellas driving the truck missed a down shift going up a large hill. Darned near stalled it out and it did the same thing as your tractor /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif I guess it does happen just not very often.

I know I dont want it to happen to me /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

scotty

 

[Joe1]

As an interesting aside here, I spent two weeks on a Maersk lince ship chartered by Military Sealift Command. The ship was stationed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean when I was aboard her. It was powered by a low speed Fiat Diesel engine, 7 cylinders, producing 35,000 HP (17 kts) at its makimum of 95 RPM. It idled at 35 RPM (5 kts), and to back the ship down the engine was stopped and restarted in the opposite direction. The aluminum pistons weighed 2,500 lbs each. One could stand in the crankcase and in the cylinders. It ran fine in either direction. Each cylinder could be disconnected and it would run, but lost 5,000 hp per cylinder. The 635' long 36,000 ton ship had cargo to sustain a marine invasion and was used in the first and I believe second gulf wars.

That's when I was young and foolish, now I'm old and foolish.