Air Cleaner Fire

Nasty! So did the turbo bits pass thru the engine ok?
Good to hear of the good service you obtained up there. How did you go with insurance?
Gerry

Yep the turbo bits must have been small enough to go thru the valves without damage...I hope. all seems ok. Insurance company was great as well, with approval within an hour of recieving the quote from the garage. Not very often you can say good things about insurance companies, but this is one.

Hi Warren, was just wondering did you determine how the fire started in the airbox, did the snorkel suck it through ?? I presume this is the only way it would have entered the airbox ?? Regards Steve

I see a picture like this and it makes me glad I've got a petrol engine.'
I reckon you were very lucky it wasn't a major engine failure.
You must have picked up a burning piece of grass in the air intake?
I would be pulling the head off to check the tops of the pistons if that was my engine before the insurance signs off on it.

Cheers

I'm wondering if a Cyclonic PreCleaner would have separated out the burning embers and prevented the paper filter fire ?

During the Canberra Fires the urban Fire Pumpers were disbaled when their air filters caught fire from the embers.

I wonder how Rural Fire service tankers prevent this problem ? I've never heard of an RFS tanker being disabled by ember intake.

Most interesting story & pics / explanation.

Glad it worked out OK for you - besides the obvious worry in the interim while waiting etc, and also good that the insurer looked after you.

I fiind the amount of damage to the turbo blades absolutely amazing.

I could imagine that in a fire inside the air cleaner with inducted air under vacuum pressure that temps could get quite hot - superheated in fact.

I just find it hard to believe that hot burnt paper could do that much damage to the turbo fan blades in 1 kilometer between passing the fire & when the engine stopped. (essentially all the metal mesh in the filter was undamaged/ remained in situ).

So - the only thing passing thru the turbo would have been smoke & ash from the burning element paper, and whatever dirt (silica) was trapped within the paper element.

Thats a huge amount of erosion on the turbo fan blades, turbps as a rule get pretty warm at shutdown etc with radiant heat from the exhaust fan side of the turbo...so those fan blades should be pretty heat tolerant metal one would think.

It seems obvious from your description - that you then had to drive the rest of the way to Derby from the Broome end grassfire incident, without any form of air flter?.

I am wondering if this isn't where MOST of the turb fan erision damage occurred?.....

Sometimes you can get away with driving without an air filter for reasonable distances IF the air is clean of suspended dust, and typically this would be on sealed roads around the citys during or just after rain when the air is clean and theres no dust.

However up north with dry conditions - and twisters / dust devils / willy willys, road trains and other traffiic, sometimes the air contains a LOT more dust than we realise and at speed thru a air intake sysytem on a turbo can be quite abraisive.

Perhaps the mahjority of erosive damage to the turbo blades was done on the unfiltered air trp to Derby?

Maybe theres lessons here for the rest of us about using and carrying a "beanie" ore filter on the snorkel intake and carrying a spare air filter?

Maybe the beanie would have stopped the ember and maybe the spare air filter would have prevented the turbo damage.

Were it mine - i would be worried about having "dusted" the engine (polished out the honing cros bleep ching of the cylinder bores) and them now behaving like glazed bores allowing oil and compression to bypass the rings etc.

At the least I would get a cylinder contribution test performed (compression test), in case there is advanced cylinder and ring wear as a result of the unfiltered air trip to Derby commensurate with that we are seeing in advanced erosion of the turbo fan blades.

Somehow something just doesnt sit right - between the described incident and the photos of Turbo damage to me - I'd be guessing theres more damage so far unseen based on what the photos depict.

I could of course be totally wrong, and for your sake I sure hope so.

Best of luck and thanks for taking the trouble to post - I'm off to get a spare air cleaner and snorkel beanie!

Cheers

That was a lot of bad luck - Glad it is all back on the road - On a different note. Driving down a track through the rainforrest the other day my diesel started making some funny noises and lost some power. Stopped straight away.

Culprit was a large H/Duty leaf that had covered the snorkel intake. Shows you have to be aware of what is going down that chute. Cheers Tony

Warren,

do you think this would have been minimised if the head of the snorkel was turned around to face backwards?

I've never heard of this before but I guess it's exactly the same as being told to turn the evaporative aircon off during a bushfire.......

cheers from Halls Head.