Sometimes customer moan that they think Yanmar engines are rubbish as they don’t start very well in the winter to which I always reply that there’s nothing wrong with the Yanmar 3TNV88-XWA-2 engine, it’s normally the owner or driver of the Thwaites dumper that is the problem.
We all know the perils of not fitting genuine Thwaites air filters to the Thwaites dumper, we saw an incident recently where a customer had fitted non-genuine air filters and it turned out that it was a couple of mm shorter than the genuine Thwaites dumper filter and therefore wasn’t sealing and sucking in dirty air.
We recently had a Thwaites 3 tonne dumper in for an engine change as it was incredibly hard to start. When removing the air filter pipework everything was caked internally with dust and, after looking at the air filters, you could see why.
It’s been an incredibly dry summer which has resulted in sites being incredibly dusty. As you can see from the pictures both the Thwaites external and the internal safety filters are jammed solid with dust, the internal filter has even started degrading and has a hole in it. The Yanmar 3TNV88-XWA-2 and its replacement, the Yanmar 3TNV88-BWWA suck and awful lot of air through the filter and therefore will always be able to suck the finer particles through when the filter becomes blocked.
The secret is to service your engines frequently. We never seem to see these problems with excavators fitted with Yanmar engines, I think people tend to look after their diggers better as, after all, it’s only a dumper!!! As an industry I think we still see dumpers as a wheelbarrow with an old Lister Petter engine in, running off a 50% diesel/water mixture and servicing once a millennium or when the engine oil is so thick you can’t pull the dipstick out.
In didn’t help that this summer was the driest and dustiest for years and now the temperature has dropped engines that were hanging on just won’t start.
Always service your Yanmar 3TNV88-XWA-2 or Yanmar 3TNV88-BWWA engines frequently and always use genuine Thwaites parts, if you don’t want to buy your Thwaites parts from PES we’re always ready sell you a Yanmar engine at a later date!!!!
