You think changing your crankshaft is a big job...

[gtxracer]

All of ours in the plant used air motors to turn them over. Nothing really impressive looking but functional.

I thought they might use a hand "Cranky" tee hee!

 

[493 Mike]

There were several large gas fired (nat gas) engines in the refinery when I hired in and they could be a pita to work on and they were not in a dang ship! The biggest difference between the engines in the refinery and ones in a ship was filth. Some were well cared for and some were pretty much ignored as far as keeping them clean went. One V8 engine that had somewhere around a 24" piston was on it's second (since I hired in) rebuild and someone screwed up on the oil system and it ended up with a dry start and killed the crank. That one was never fixed and ended up being replaced with an electric motor years later. Another blew it's muffler off after someone couldn't get the fueling right. No one got hurt or killed but it did some damage and created a very large boom. Several years before my retirement, there wasn't a single gas fired engine left in the plant. There's also a scrap yard not too far from me that has several acres of old engines from refineries etc just sitting. Didn't mind seeing everything converted over to electrics too much but there were a couple that were actually kinda cool to work on and they did create a good amount of OT if you were looking for that.

For two weeks during my apprenticeship I worked around a V-8 natural gas pumping engine also burning NG. It was turbo charged and had a 30" exhaust pipe and it did have "muffler bearings", basically slides for expansion. If I remember correctly it ran at 100 RPM and made 2,000 HP and I believe had a 14" bore.
Mike

 

[727]

They don’t use a torque wrench on the main caps. They use hydraulic jacks to stretch the studs to a predetermined pressure then hand tighten the nuts.

They use about 500 psi of start air injected into the cylinders in a timed sequence. When the engine is rolling on air the fuel rack is raised and it fires off.

 

[not so famous bob]

All of ours in the plant used air motors to turn them over. Nothing really impressive looking but functional.

Ditto on the air start. Look up v20 and v16 nat. gas pipeline engines, straight 8`s and everything in between. Some have run for 30 plus yrs before tear down. Olathe Kansas pipeline station has a couple of v16`s , never was around a v 20 tho.