windrush:
albion1938:
Back in the D series days I managed to blag a behind the scenes visit to Heathrow airport shown round by the fleet manager for all those yellow motors with “Heathrow” on the sides, mixed fleet used for all the maintenance around the place. I’d actually gone there to view half a dozen old very low mileage Bedford RS 4wd tippers with a view to tendering to buy them, but was told they wouldn’t now be available for a while as they were keeping them in reserve due to having trouble with their replacements and were in dispute with Ford Motor Co. These replacements were 4wd D1000 tippers with Perkins V8s, fitted with winches and snowplough brackets, in a nutshell they didn’t like all the short runs, were glazing the bores resulting in bad starting and running and burning large amounts of oil. I don’t know what happened next, never got the call about the Bedfords.
But more recently I was talking to a mate, ex Perkins development engineer. Apparently Perkins carried out a mod for oil burning issues on the early V8.
Fit a longer dipstick and put less oil in!
BernardAny diesel on that sort of work will have problems with oil burning/sludging up. My mate has decently bought a reconditioned Lister single pot aircooled engine to drive a woodturning lathe that he uses at shows and after only a few weeks use it is already blowing oil through the exhaust due to bore glazing. They really need to work, and work HARD to avoid that.
When I worked for a Bedford dealer in Wokingham in the 70’s once a year we serviced a CF van with the Perkins 4.154 engine and this was on internal work at Heathrow and only travelled off site for its annual service. Of course it never got warm, to change the engine oil we used to run it at half throttle for half an our, remove the sump plug and wait…and wait!
Then we connected an airline to an adapter on the oil filler and blew the rest of the oil out. Of course removing and cleaning the sump would have been the best option, but on those the front suspension was actually bolted to the sump so would have meant removing the complete axle etc. Eventually the engine ‘ran’ the bearings and I fitted a new crank etc.
As I said previously we fitted modified liners to the early V8’s to cure oil burning and I assume that different rings were also fitted but I can’t remember now as I wasn’t personally involved in the work. The only Perkins V8’s I dismantled was many years later at Tilcon’s quarry, we ‘inherited’ two 4 wheeler Mastiffs from another company and I re-rang them but they had done several hundred thousands of miles by then and were eventually put on internal work as we couldn’t cure the smoke on them. Two new Sed Ak 200’s replaced them, the drivers were not too happy about that as they couldn’t match the performance of the V8’s on the Peak District banks! Nothing much else could at that time though as they were ‘fliers’.
Pete.
I think what peeved them at Heathrow Pete was that they’d spent the money on new motors and had trouble, but the Bedford 330s, all about 15 years old with between 7000-60000 miles, worth peanuts, all started and ran as good as gold.
Bernard