FUBAR 6.0L Turbo Failure!
I want to show you a really crazy turbo charger failure in a 2006 F450 boom truck. I have never seen anything quite like this. This truck came into the shop as a no start. It has a 1 ½ year old motor and the operator doesn’t know what happened.
The diagnostics showed that there was no oil pressure being produced. First, we pulled the oil filter which was clean. Even hard inspection in between the pleats found that there was no problem there. Next, we dropped the oil out. There was no iron or anything on the magnet but there was a lot of little brass particles inside and a leak on the front cover. When we pulled the oil pump out of the front cover, what we found was really quite startling. The gerotor actually came out in four pieces and the front cover was cracked. Evidently there was some sort of major explosion inside the oil pump. This was really quite a mystery.
Seeing the brass, we checked the turbo charger. This is a stick shift truck. (Stick shift trucks are particularly hard on their turbo chargers.) We saw on the shaft that there was a failure and one of the bearings was basically glued onto the shaft. There was also some bluing on the bushing. The turbine actually came in contact with the case in a couple of spots.
How did there get to be so much brass in the bottom of the oil pan that it clogged the oil pump and break it? Cooper and brass exists in this engine on the small end of the connecting rods. We thought there might have been a failure there; but when we got up underneath the motor and took a hard look, there was nothing inside the motor that could attribute to any failure internally. There was no heating of the end of the connecting rod like a failure would show. There may have been a bearing failure. Everything inside the engine looked fantastic.
The only thing we could attribute the shavings to was the brass from the bushings inside the turbo charger. It was obviously the turbo charger because there was clean oil going into the top of the turbo and brass shavings coming out and ending up in the bottom of the oil pan. Possibly the operator turned the engine off without really cooling the turbo down and the turbo was still spinning at very high RPM. The lack of oil pressure caused the bearing to fail, which dropped a whole pile of brass into the oil pan, which got picked up and shoved inside the oil pump and caused this failure.
We also noticed that the oil in this truck was very old. These trucks have a lot of idle time from running the boom. It might have been just purely a lubricant failure or possibly an operator just not cooling the turbo charger down. You just have to keep up with the maintenance. ~
