These aren’t really deal killers, and I don’t think they are bad, but people should be aware of them. It seems to me that CAT got the weak blocks and dropped valve problems squared away quickly, but there are still 3 “Defeciencies” in this engine. (Hint, if someone thinks something is under-powered it probably also means they were running it very very hard in an attempt to get enough power for the job.) People whose experience with this engine is limited to Heavy Duty use (Truckers) also think they are under-powered and trash. CAT seems to have gotten this issue solved, but not before the damage to the engine’s reputation had been done.Īlso, it seems like the CAT 3216 engine was used in a few heavy duty applications where it just didn’t quite have the power to do what was asked of it and a larger engine should have been chosen. A LOT of these engines failed and were replaced under warranty, I even read an account of an account where CAT replaced both engines in a boat twice. I read somewhere that a user had to run 2800+ RPM, but 2200 RPM seems to be the typical redline for these engines (). A company called Sea-Ray put pairs of the higher power Cat 31? in some of their boats, from what I read to get the boat up on a plane you had to run the engines at near 100% power and past what seems to be the normal redline. Same block, but with a combination of parts and / or ECU programming CAT can make it perform differently. How come they seemed to fail more in Marine use? The engine is rated all over the map, from 170HP to 300+HP. I suspect it is actually less, but I have no idea). CAT being CAT they took care of their customers and replaced a fair number of engines (I don’t know how many, but my rough estimate would be somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the early marine engines (but, that is totally a SWAG. Also, there are some stories about dropped valves (when a valve in the head of the engine comes loose or breaks and gets repeatedly smashed in between the piston and the cylinder head (not good)).
3126 cat engine problems cracked#
I read some posts saying that the early 3126 blocks were weak, and cracked frequently (Something about a french foundry making bad castings) but I think that was actually the 3116 and CAT pro-actively recalled those blocks. The 3126 is based on an earlier engine (3116), it appears that earlier engine had some bad problems and this started it out on a bad foot. Now, CAT builds good stuff so what’s the truth here? I think it is the following… Said they didn’t last, would have cracked blocks, dropped valves, etc… The marine community said similar things, but I could only find one instance of an RV user who said they had to have the engine replaced at 69k miles. I found a lot of diesel enthusiasts and truckers who really slammed the engine. It is based on an earlier design (3116), and when it was retired, the CAT C-7 was based on it and was it’s replacement. It was used in everything from boats, cranes, over the road trucks and ambulances to RVs and buses. The Caterpillar 3126 engine is a CAT engine that was used for light and medium duty uses. But if you are just using it in your RV, and you don’t have a lead foot, I think you’ll be just fine. If you try to use it for a heavy duty, continuous duty cycle application you’ll be disappointed. My conclusion is that I believe the 3126 is a very good engine. If they really were THAT BAD there would be a lot more first hand accounts online. Here’s the thing, even though the 3126 is bad mouthed all over the internet there are thousands, and likely 10s if not hundreds of thousands of these engines around and still in use. internet forums posts) so take it with a grain of salt. Everything in this post is based on hearsay (i.e. Hopefully it is a reasonably accurate distillation of many many hours of research. or so we thought the next morning we fired the old beast (freightliner) up hooked up and pulled out got several miles down the road and my volt goage started dropping oh well its just 250 more miles Ha several more miles and the good old allison trans.This is a summary post of a bunch of research I’ve done…. They determined it was the ECM or in english the computer, so after 2500.00 and A few more days we were going to be on the road and moving to Ft Morgan Colo. Ok fellers after trying all sugestions and pulling what little hair I had left out I finally had it toe\wed to cat, thank god for G.S.
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