AUTOPSY of a Caterpillar Pony Motor. | What Went Wrong?

What's up guys, welcome back to Diesel Creek? My name is Matt, this little hunk of iron here on the deck is a two-cylinder Caterpillar Pony engine. Now bear with me because I have a bit of a long intro for you because I have to provide a little backstory since it's been so long since you've seen this. This thing has been making a mess all year and anyway it's been bouncing around the store too pygmy here by the time it's ready today, all the fluids. We'll be out of this, so we won't have to worry about it, so this piece of iron here is a Caterpillar Pony engine.

Maybe you guys have seen the videos on the Caterpillar d8h I have, if you haven't. I'll put a link to them in the description. Definitely worth seeing. I think the d8 is probably my favorite piece of iron that I bought so quick story if you haven't seen the previous videos on the d8 is this was the original Pony

motor

in that machine and when I got there to revive that thing I was full of water, we had just come out of a big cold snap, so it was surprising that this thing was even salvageable, um, but somehow it's been sitting for years apparently full of water, it took a while, but we were able to get this engine running and that was not without problems, the starter on this unit never wanted to engage the teeth of the bendex and everything on this starter and others we had we tried, none of them would activate, the only way we could get it to start It was by loosening the bolts that hold the starter on by cocking it at some ridiculous angle and then twisting it until it fired and then you have to let the starter hang back up and tighten the bolts afterwards, otherwise you'd be grinding the teeth of the starter. starter

motor

so not sure

what

is causing that but that was the number one problem after a while and by fiddling around we were able to get the diesel.

It started up pretty easily and we

went

back a few weeks later to charge it thinking it would be very easy to restart and charge it, so when we

went

back a few weeks later to charge the d8 we found we had some bigger problems. As I mentioned before, the exhaust from the Pony engine passes through the diesel engine intake instead of helping to preheat the intake. In our case, we were actually flooding the combustion chamber of the diesel engine with exhaust from the Pony engine because the exhaust inside part of the intake had rusted out, so in all the time it took us to figure out

what

the heck was going on with that diesel engine we were running the

pony

pretty hard, I think we overheated it a couple of times and not to mention it probably wasn't in the best shape to begin with, after we finally figured out what was going on we released the diesel intake letting it got some fresh oxygen in while we were trying to start, we turned on the diesel and the diesel barely turned on.

Then we heard a big bang coming from the gearbox here on the

pony

engine and I saw that hole appear there along with a big crack. I don't know if you can see it, there's a crack running up. here and of course it was draining all its oil, so thanks to some super generous subscribers I got a couple extra Pony motors for the old cat. I was able to swap one of those new Pony motors for this one and now the d8 is running. and starting reliably, but I promised you a teardown video about a year ago and we're finally starting to do it, so there's a nice in-depth look at Carnage's visible exterior, there's a crack that looks like it starts right here goes. down that big chunk was blown off and the crack runs down and out of sight it looks like the crack maybe ends right at the bottom of that casing so in the case of our d8 and all the pony motors that are this .

Not only is the style an engine here, we have a two speed gearbox here, so in really very cold temperatures you can put the pony engine in low range and that will allow you to start the diesel at slow speeds until the throttle rises. high enough temperature in the oil to make it start faster and then you would flip it to high range so this guy here is your high low range and it seems to be stuck now, it used to shift fine. The other thing that's happening here is your Bendex clutch, as you can see, when you move this lever here, it pulls the Bendex gear towards the flywheel and there's a clutch there as well, so it's not just ramming it. from Gears I'm not 100% sure how that setting works there.

I've never had one of these apart, so we'll find out together that this Pony engine is almost complete without the carburetor, so I'm a little curious. how much does this thing weigh these new forklifts i bought have scales uh this one isn't accurate when i first picked it up it said about 450 lbs which sounds about right. I guess the first thing we should do before I bother putting it on the bench and start taking it apart, we should drain the oil out of this thing, well there's the magnetic oil drain plug and it's got all kinds of metallic paste all over it, that one.

It's the engine side gearbox still draining the engine. now it's draining too, it took a second for the engine oil to start coming out, so the plug is obviously stuck there, there's some kind of blockage, yeah that definitely doesn't look good there, these things here should be here. the gearbox doesn't look that terrible, so here we are the next day and obviously you guys can't feel this, but look at the mud on the bottom of this poor engine, it's bad, oh my god, this. It's going to be bad, yeah, things aren't looking good inside this anyway, let's finally throw this in the bank and start breaking it down, so just as a little reminder of what's going on here, I'm going to throw some power . this starter motor see if you can see it or at least here the starter motors are turning and not activating anything there now let me loosen these bolts we'll try to turn that starter motor at a weird angle and see what happens okay I think I'll get it we had. to shim it up a little bit, something like that, let's see if it activates, now contact, yeah, you guys hear the difference there, so just for Giggles I want to test this and see what kind of compression we're seeing on the engine side here before we break it out.

Other than this, you know, it's a little better than I had anticipated. It seemed like we were between 98, 95, and 98 PSI at number one. I rate the exact same, between 95 and 98 PSI, so I still have pretty even compression. Actually, call it pretty good and you can't just say "oh, this starter is bad or whatever," because we had tested it, I think two or three. I think we tried two or three different starters that my friend Sam brought for us to try and none of them. they did something different, they all did exactly the same thing, so something is definitely not right in this middle section and that also seems plausible because of the hole in the case we have here now, so why do we care about compression?

Why do we even bother to tear down this piece of iron? It's just clearly useless, it has a hole in the side. Put it in the scrap bin and move on with your life. Well, they don't make these things anymore. There are only I plan to keep these things going for as long as humanly possible so that every little part of here that's salvageable uh we're going to maintain. No, I probably won't throw any of this away. I'm going to destroy it. I show you exactly what went

wrong

and that will help me get an idea of ​​what's still good there so I have a good idea of ​​what I have for spares in the future, as realistically as it looks like the engine section so far.

Well, I mean, I'm sure I could make this work with just the motor. Something about this side of things isn't good, so I guess I'm really going to start with this. I'll pull the starter motor. I'll pull these two covers. from the top here and we're going to start taking it apart from the back until we get to the actual engine case here, hopefully you guys can see the teeth on the starter bendex, they're all in decent shape. very little wear on them and from what I can see by looking there on the bellhousing it looks like the ring gear teeth are fine too, so why isn't the starter activating them properly?

These are the mysteries I'm trying to figure out. I noticed that there's our gear selector that's right there. I don't think it's good. I'm trying to get this Bell crank to come off the axle and it's actually lifting the entire axle out of there. um, that doesn't seem good, it seems. like something that shouldn't be able to happen there we go there are the high and low range gear train bearings they still feel good on those cogs and everything looks good so I would say this part is good we'll just go ahead and we will leave this. here on the good stack there's a spike inside that section of the gearbox and you can see all the multicolored swirling, a lot of that is metal shaving, but honestly, for something that's this old and probably neglected for its entire life, I'm going to say that's not that bad any time you have straight cut gears in an oil bath, you'll find some metal shavings in there, especially the older it gets simply from natural wear and tear. the gears, it doesn't mean that. there's something wearing away, um, but we'll definitely always see a little bit of metal deposit like that and a lot of what you can see is just this thick, heavy mud, so that tells you, uh, I'm taking a bolt out here, which I think preserves this clutch shaft well, so we can see the inside of our clutch compartment.

Here we will try to find out what is stopping us here. Well, I haven't figured out how to take this apart yet, but I found some Carnage. thing wedged between the gearbox and whatever else that thing there is a gear tooth down there looks like I haven't figured out where it came from yet, but it sure looks like the profile of a gear tooth to me I probably can't pull it any further apart this gearbox without separating it from the engine side, so that's my mission at the moment. I think I got all the bolts out and I'm hoping this gearbox comes off, here we go, it's a heavy lift. little steering wheel.

I didn't expect to see all that. By the way, I've never had one of these apart. I don't know if I mentioned that I'm learning along with you, so there you have it, we've got a clutch pack right there. It looks like we have three steel plates and three frictions and those engage inside the flywheel on those splines and that's how the power is taken from the engine and passed through the gearbox all the way to the diesel engine. I'm looking at some Carnage down. here at the bottom of the gearbox I still don't see where they came from so that's interesting oh yeah look at all that metal paste down here oh my god that looks like a fault no good I still can't see where from come these gear teeth we're going to have to dig a little more oh, there's a plug down here that I haven't seen yet.

Square socket there we go that gives me access to drive that shaft up, oh you know. Which looks like if I undo this bolt, the whole assembly might slide forward. In reality, these little metal tabs simply bend over the hexagon on the head of the bolt and lock that bolt from coming loose. Come on, that's the clutch assembly. This bearing is quite noisy. I think this one has had a couple of hot dinners. This is an interesting piece. I'm not exactly sure what it does. It's shaped like a bearing ring, there we go. Okay, so we're pretty much 100% disassembled on this gearbox, the only thing left is the shifter, the fork slider up there and I don't really feel the need to tear that thing down because there are some freeze plugs. and stuff in there just hold it, let's let it go for now, there's clearly nothing

wrong

with it so we turn our attention to the engine now, so while I was cleaning the bottom of the gearbox I found several more gear teeth down there and apparently there are a few more missing from this puzzle because this is not a complete gear, as you can see there are no traces of it anywhere else, although I think the only thing you'll see is this thick paste here that was at the bottom of the clutch box, I can't even figure out exactly where that gear went but I just know it's no longer with us, the gear left the chat so to speak, the other thing I noticed was in the engine here.

I was looking through the face of the engine here and it seemed to me that the gap between the flywheel and the block was larger at the top than at the bottom, so I got a little curious and pulled a lever on it. Houston, we have a The problem now is that a lot of these older engines don't have the same tight tolerances as modern engines, but I'm like 190% sure that thatIt's out of spec, that extreme slope that happens on those crankshafts. The bearings explain why the starter doesn't engage where it should because the crankshaft isn't located where it should be, the entire flywheel assembly should be more like up here and then the starter would probably get a good grip on it, but instead of That, it hangs too low and the starter just fails it, so that's not good.

I guess at this point we can turn the engine over and we'll take out the bottom half of the case here and see how this goes together. I don't think these engines had roller bearings for the crankshaft. I think they had babit bearings, but let's find out to remove the bottom half of the motor case. Looks like we're going to have to pull. First the front cover, the first thing you take off is this little bevel gear and all this does is give you a place where you can put an actual starter crank on this thing, so you just have one crank that engages with these two small pins. down on this boore and you could theoretically start the pony's engine by hand.

I've never done. I know it's possible, although next up is our Magneto here and we're going to be careful with this because I know it's working. This could just be a straight swap, if we go out on a Revival I could take this with us and put it on the pony motor instead of having to go in there and clean up the points and everything, this one was already dialed in and running, yeah look that. Alright, we've got the engine open here and everything looks good so far. It looks like this would be the camshaft gear on the crankshaft.

Here it runs to a gear of the governor. This device slides in and out and operates the Governor here and then. The other half of this thing drives your camshaft, looks like all those things have to be timed, we already have time, uh, but don't worry, I don't think it'll get back together anyway, let's pull the till bottom and see how bad the crankshaft bearing is on the other side, but let's check this side first. Oh yeah, this side of the crankshaft bearing isn't as hot either, but it's definitely not as bad as the other end.

I don't know why they have these Castle nuts fixed here we'll find out once we remove them. I'm sure this is a good trick to get the cotter pins out. If you've never done this, make your side cuts and just bite into that. cotter pin and then use them as leverage because the side cuts really dig into the pin, hold it tight, you just have to watch if your side cuts are really nice and sharp, you have to watch that they don't cut the pin, it's okay, it's coming apart , here we go. I saw that you guys were coming ready to see some Carnage.

Things aren't looking good for poor Pony. Smoked here, that's the only word I can use. This poor bear is smoked. And? We have to see here. Hopefully you can see that the main journal that is there on the crankshaft is in very bad condition. It has visible wear grooves throughout. I don't know if they could really turn it around and repair it at this point. you probably have to build it first, the bearing side is where it gets real. I was right, there are no roller bearings or anything here, it's just a bearing insert, you can definitely see it like a big chunk of metal embedded in the bearing material. just smashed up really really really bad this is the bottom half so all the gravity hangs down on this half so I imagine it's probably worse than the top half the opposite side here I haven't done it yet separated, actually, the other top side is here. a one piece bearing, so to remove it we would have to pull the crankshaft assembly, undo this castellated nut, that gear, and then that bearing would slide out of there.

I don't know if we're going to get carried away with it, but man, she was uh. she's messed up, a good amount of metal sludge here feels like you guys have ever made one of the non-neonian fluids like cornstarch and water, how it has that hard feeling when you first hit it and then they sink. on it, that's pretty much what this metallic oil mixture feels like down here. I don't see any big chunks in it or anything. I didn't see it before splitting it, but there are also some pretty mangled and chewed teeth on this crankshaft gear. in pretty bad shape from what I can see, camshaft lobes and all that, looks pretty good, got a little worn just from operating in that metal impregnated oil I'm sure, but maybe I can save the bottom half of the cylinders as much as possible.

Look, doesn't it look terrible, oh, we've got some damage to the bottom of that piston, can you see that thing is full of scars and dents? Things are not looking good for this poor Pony, yes, we have something written here, something written. on the 1698 crankshaft it looks like the rods have been made 20 over The mains are 20 over on one two of 73 by someone with the initials PC, that's a pretty interesting little piece of history, so here's why that the last time this engine was separated was in 1973. Would you believe that H can't even get this exhaust port to fall apart.

Well, I'm just putting this back into the bottom case so we can rotate the assembly. I'm going to take the head off and take a look at those cylinders, the last thing I want to do is take this head off and just take a look at these cylinders and see what they look like right now. The block can still be used if we had some new bearings and a good crankshaft we could reuse this block head doesn't look too bad this is cylinder number two here overall it looks pretty good definitely looks like it has a few hours on it but it really doesn't no significant indentation or All I see is a little line up there, around 9:00, the number one cylinder position doesn't look as good, but it's not bad, although overall I think if we did a little work here we could probably reuse it.

Please note that this block is only a visual inspection. I'm not actually checking this with microphones or anything to see what kind of specs we have. Well, you guys saw how nasty that gearbox is. I'm going to go ahead and throw the parts washer in here, let it get nice and clean before I have to stick it on a shelf somewhere to see the parts. We'll check on those things in a few minutes when it's done cooking. The rest of these things. I don't want to go over there, the cover could have done it, but I was a little worried about drying up all the pieces of this Governor's assembly, maybe losing some pieces, uh, all these sets of equipment and things that I'd rather just leave.

They are oily for storage purposes, a little oil isn't going to hurt anything, all it will do is protect it from rust over the years it was in a container. That gearbox was so disgusting I didn't even want to touch it. I kept it, maybe I could throw this head in there too, but it's not bad. I ended up going out at night and let the cycle finish. How does it look this morning? Better. Actually, you can see it's yellow. It's not yellow at all before shit, you can also see a lot more Carnage, so there's a crack that starts, oh, it lightens up here, it looks like maybe I think I see a very faint hairline that starts up here, down and around. through the broken and fragmented point it splits into two cracks down here, but the main crack continues down and around it looks like it ends right there, man, that whole half of the gearbox is barely hanging there I don't think. there will be some salvation in that that would be a serious repair, eh, like I said, these things are not rare yet, but they are definitely not hard to find, but they are becoming less common with each passing day, there are more and more. of them end up in junkyards unfortunately, I don't know if there will be anything to keep in this one, so I don't know if there's any point in storing it, unfortunately I think I'll end up taking the rest out.

Trims like these oil caps and dipsticks and we'll take out the shifter. After all, the fork will probably end up throwing out that gearbox. I don't think it makes sense to keep it around these other parts that we throw in the parts washer. See, this thing was so dirty you couldn't even read it. Now you can clearly see where it says high and low. You can see the part numbers on everything this thing cleaned. Very cute, just this piece of square plate for the bottom. This came, this little piece of square plate was screwed into the bottom of the gearbox so it was pretty dirty, nice and clean, now we'll keep it.

I think this is a wrap for this poor Pony engine. There are many good pieces. There are bits we're going to hoard and save for future projects, but definitely some Carnage. I don't think we'll be rebuilding this particular unit in its entirety anytime soon, at least I'm glad we have some. A little bit of closure on this and we just know for sure what exactly went wrong and what caused the failure and what to look for in the future if we ever come across another Pony d8 engine and the starter isn't working right, we know things. .

They probably won't do very well there. I never found out where those gear teeth came from, so I'll have to study the parts book, I guess, and see if I can find a really small gear like six or seven teeth. The problem is looking through all these pieces. Parts. I couldn't really see anywhere where one was missing. You know, normally you'd see some remains of it or there wasn't even a place on the shaft anywhere for that wooden key. Wow, if you're familiar with this stuff, any of you in the comments think you might know, leave a comment below, let me know where that little team is supposed to go because I'm pretty stumped about that part of this time. you're down there, leaving your comment, do me a big favor if you like this video, don't forget to hit the little like button below, the video really helps, the channel doesn't cost you guys, just a second of your time.

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