1,000,000 miles on Patrol engine

[npca-yaquiway]

don't know if most of you have seen this. I found it pretty cool though. I am not affiliated with Owens -Export nor did I write the article........

 

 

http://www.owens-export.com/stuff.html

 

Copy of a Story I wrote for a Japanese Magazine "CCV". I sold an engine from a Nissan Patrol to a company that used it as a electrical generator in an oil field. the engine runs off of natural gas that is produced along with the crude oil. This engine runs 24 hours a day and has had surprisingly little down time in 2 years. Since it runs under full load constantly, we can approximate that to driving a car down the road at 60 Mph. We calculated this engine has the equivalent of 1,000,000 miles driven so far.... Patrol Engine
 

[npca-jfh0jfh]

This is misleading: natural is much cleaner and easier on the engine; running at constant or controlled load is nothing like the varying load an engine sees in a vehicle.

[npca-grant]

>>This is misleading

 

No, actually it is just interesting, espically when you consider he noted the conditions driving down a road at a constant speed and even went as far as to point out that it is approximate. Oh, and I dont buy the natural gas thing being easier on an engine, cleaner, ok sure, easier... Enh!

 

Grant

 

[npca-voypwatcher]

Still it is very impressive considering some of the SUV junk which is being peddled off nowadays.

I would take 300,000 miles as very good in mixed driving conditions.

[npca-steve]

Actually, since I wrote the article, I figured I would chime in...
It really surprised me how well this engine performed under the
conditions. It is true that a constant speed is maybe easier on
the engine. One point is that since the Generator will make as
much power as possible, the engine was always running at
max capacity. I would equate it to driving up a 60% grade at
full throttle in first gear. You should have heard this thing
running! You could really tell it was working. The motor has
since died, it wound up throwing a rod through the block and
that was the end of the project but it far exceeded our wildest
expectations. It ran a total of about 3 years with only several
days of down time due to failures in the electronics. We also
had a problem with the distributor wearing out... We rebuilt it 3 or
4 times.
It is true that natural gas is cleaner, but we were running this motor
on so called "Dirty" gas... Straight from the well, no processing other
than a screen filter to remove chunks from the gas.
The engine oil did stay pretty clean and it was funny because towards
the end of the motors life, they just kept adding oil every few days as
it would use it faster than changing it completely.

Since the death of the Patrol motor, the company switched to a larger
generator with a natural gas Chevy 454 big block. That motor lasts
about 1 year and then needs to be replaced. The little Patrol engine
did 3 times the length of service!

Steve

[RiverPatrol]