All the FIRES

Local widow let her late husband's mid size Cat dozer sit for approximately 6 months in a shed. Rodents built a mansion on the turbo and when the machine was fired up guess what? A nice fire erupted causing significant damage without the dozer doing any work. And yes the hot side of a turbo can get red hot.

I saw a hydraulic line get a pin hole on a D8K. The stream hit the turbo and the stream became a flame thrower. Saw a fuel injector line crack at the ferule nut and spray onto the turbo. Same result, nearly lost both machines.

The fire I referred to before was a pilot hydraulic hose failure inside the Hell Hole of a dozer that managed to spray forward into the engine compartment. Thank God for AFEX...!!

I checked on the monitor system and I was correct. Anything below 750C (1380F) turbo inlet temperature will not generate an alarm on a machine with exhaust temperature sensors.

For anyone interested here's a couple of photos I took years ago when investigating a fatal fire on an ADT underground. The machine burned to the ground and unfortunately the operator and 2 members of the rescue team lost their lives due to smoke inhalation. One theory was grease falling on to the exhaust about 6ft back from the turbo had spontaneously combusted. We did this simple experiment of heating a piece of 1/4" steel plate with a gas axe and then dropping a ball of grease on it. You can see that at 485C (900F) all that happens is that it smokes, although I'm sure if you had thrown a latch into it combustion would have taken place. However at 602C (1115F) the grease spontaneously combusts. I have a load of other photos at temperatures in between those two but 600C+ was the temperature at which the grease would burn without an outside spark every time. I'm fairly sure that lubricating oils would spontaneously combust at temperatures below 600C, and anything plant-based at temperatures waaaay below that so long as it was dry.