Fault Finding 3

[Big Pete]

Same ship as fault finding 2. (Gonio)
Main engine from M.A.N. built under licence in the former Yugoslavia / Croatia.
Before I joined the ship I was told that every couple of years, the engine threw a connecting rod and crosshead out of the side of the engine, and that it would be a bonus if I could work out why.
One day in Port the engineers carried out an inspection of the piston rings. (this type of engine has a removable inspection port on the side of the cylinder liner) and found a broken ring. They then pulled the piston to change the ring.
While standing on top of the engine looking down the bore, I discovered the reason why the engine had been ripping crossheads and guides out of the entablature.

Can anyone guess the reason?

[JK]

Something to do with the slignment of the liner, packing gland and crosshead guide I am thinking.
This is only based on working on a steam recip many,many years ago not on any firm knowledge of big 2-strokes.

Edited later to say that if the alignment was off then the packing gland would have not stood up to it and would have failed before the rest of the damage occurred.

[Big Pete]

JK

You are on the right lines, but think bigger.
BP.

[ArkSeaJumper]

As a guess, I would say when you looked down, the crankshaft was slightly off centre.

[JK]

Where the tie bolts tight?

[Big Pete]

You Got it JK.
I was standing on the centreline of the engine, looking down the cylinder bore (it was the forward most unit opened up) and I naturally sighted down the wear marks in the liner surface, just like looking down a gun barrel, the crankshaft was off centre. At first I thought it must be an optical illusion and looked at it from several different angles, then I went for a walk round the engine room and came back, but it was still the same. I then started to question my original assumption that the crankshaft should be on the same centre line as the liners and thought about the effects on the engine if it was off centre. I realised that an off centre crankshaft, (it was further away from the cross head guides than it should have been) would put a lot of tensile force on the cross head... then it clicked, that it fitted perfectly with the the crossheads being ripped out.

There was obviously nothing I could do about this with the ship in service, so I pointed out the situation to the Chief Engineer and to my relief who joined a few days later, and put in a written report to the company.

About a week after I got off the a crosshead came out of the side of the engine and the ship was towed into Malta drydock for repairs. On investigating, it was found that the entire entablature had been fitted about 6 inches off the centreline of the crankshaft & bedplate.

I asumed that it would be an insurance claim as a "Latent defect" but it was all more complicated than that.
MAN refused to take any responsibility & the engine builder had not existed for years (probably a good thing for us all).

This had happened several times before, maybe 4 or 5 times and the Makers Men, loss adjusters, Class surveyors, Insurance, P&I surveyors and Supers had all failed to spot it when the engine was being rebuilt, so they all found it a little embarassing.
Anyway, the engine was stripped right down and rebuilt correctly aligned, so it was a happy ending.
BP

[JK]

You know I thought briefly about the entabluture being off, but dismissed it as being unlikely, even to 1/2" never mind 6". That is astounding.
There must have to be more indications then the crosshead guides parting company with the engine though?

Our friend the Irishman got it though in one!!

[Big Pete]

You would think someone would have noticed something but they weren't the brightest.....
One day I went down the engine room and saw that the running D/A had no oil in the sight glass for the turbo. I tried to get the watchkeeper to change over the D/As but he said he couldn't do that. I then tried to get him to leave the control room & look at it, but he said he was on watch so he couldn't leave the control room. I showed the it to the motorman but he just shrugged his shoulders.
I eeventually called the Chief Engineer down, he looked at it for a moment, then walked round to the over side and said it was oK because there was oil on the other side. He had no understanding that the Blower and turbine had seperate oil systems.
I eventually convinced him that we had to change over D/As and top up the oil.
I then found out that none of the Engineers, including the Chiel, could put a D/A on the board. They had to call out the ETO to synchronise the D/As and take the oil less onew off the board.
Apparently, in the Communist days, when the ship was run properly, there was an ETO on each watch to change over the D/As as required, so the engineers never learned how to do this.

The Mate was complaining that the European Paint being supplied to the ship was very poor quality and peeled off in big sheets very quickly. When I investigated I found that the Chief Mate slept in the morning after his watch and "supervised" the Deck work in the afternoon.
Consequently he had the Crew chipping all afternoon. They left the bare steel overnight, in the morning when the Deck was cold, and damp with Sea spray and condensation, the crew painted it.
Surprising it peeled off isn't it?

[JK]

Slept in your lifejacket did you?


You know, way back when I did my FG stint, we sailed from Rotterdam or Antwerp one trip and the Pilot couldn't get off because of conditions, so he stayed with us until somewhere off England. I was talking to him that evening in the officers bar and he was telling me that on most ships he wouldn't leave the bridge until he got off the ship. Since I had always had the pleasure to sail on well-managed ships, it was a bit of a shocker for me.
This is pre-ISM mind you....

[The Dieselduck]

Big Pete, that last comment just astounds me. I mean from just a personal perspective, how do you get a group of people to completely ignore some very obvious necessities for their own survival. Some of those you mentioned, I just cant understand how anyone would be so clueless, we all have to learn to crawl before we can walk and then run, but still, the oil in the turbo is a pretty simple concept. Its just sad in a car crash kinda of way.

[Big Pete]

All in all it was a very interesting trip.......but not one I wanted to repeat.

I joined the ship in Brazil, it had come across the Atlantic with 3 days diesel for the alternators, OK so long as the shaft alternator kept running, however, when they arrived in Port and were told to anchor for a week because of Port delays there was a little problem. The managers tried to get a bunker barge or a small RO Ro ferry with a road tanker on board to provide fuel but couldn't. By judicious bribery and calling in favours the Agent got us alongside and bunkers were ordered, but then the Port authorities started making repairs to a container gantry that had been in collision with a ship. The road tankers wouldn't go past the hot work, so we were blacked out for a day before we could bunker both HFO and MDO.
But no one onboard appeared to be the slightest bit concerned.

When we got the FOBAS results back for the HFO they advised that it might be too dense to seperate correctly in our purifiers and advised us to test it in our purifiers as soon as possible.
I discussed this with the Captain and Chief Engineer, obviously the first thing I wanted to know was the quantity of old, good fuel on board and the daily consumptiom, unfortunatly nobody could tell me.
The ship had two settling tanks and two service tanks so it shouldn't have been a problem to test the new batch of fuel, but the Chief kept insisting that it might damage the purifier!!!
Eventually he agreed to run one settling and service tank empty so that we could test purify a batch of the new bunkers.
Later the Captain came to me and told me what an excellent Chief Engineer we had, because now he was going to sound the fuel tanks every week. Which of course raises the question of what they had been doing before.... (I have always been used to sounding the bunker tanks daily.

I realised that they did not measure or control anything on board. They just filled every tank with fuel, water & LO when they were in Port and assumed it would be enough to last to the next Port. If they ran out it was the fault of shoreside management..
Unlike British ships where we used to pass a "Noon Chit" around the Senior Officers which would show fuel & FW ROB and consumption, distance steamed, distance to go, eta etc, the Russians just filled up everything in Port and arrived at the next Port when they got there. For a Transatlantic crossing there eta's were usually about 14 days out.
Eventually I realised why, there was no concept of measuring progress against a target and taking corrective action.
When I thought we were due to arrive at Gibraltar, I asked the Captain for an ETA. He had no idea so he phoned up the Bridge and asked for one. He told me 3 days. After 3 days I asked what time we would arrive, he phoned up the Bridge and then told me one day more..
Eventually I worked out what they were doing, they were using an old satellite transit navigation system ( a sort of fore runner of GPS), manually inputting the ships speed and using it to calculate the ETA. Unfortunatly no one measured the ship's actual speed, they used the ships service speed according to the General Arrangement drawings!!!!
Hence real passage times were considerably greater than predicted, especially as we were stopping every couple of days to change injectors, because carbon trumpets were forming on them.

On the good side they were really cheap to employ, as a weekend treat the Captain used to invite all the officers to his cabin and carve a single Mars bar or snickers bar into a slice each and share it out.
The Captain told me his wife was a Proffessor of mathematics at Batumi Uni and got paid the equivalent of 40 pence a month in those days.
However, I hope the indirect costs of employing them outweighed the saving in wages or we are all out of a job.

[JK]

I thought the story I was told about the ship that fueled light and brought on bales of cabbage so there would be enough money for cases of vodka was bad enough, but this trumps it. In that case, they ran out of fuel in the ice and just stopped in the ice and got drunk until someone showed up a week later to fuel them.