Bobcat skid steer, been in the family since new (2003-ish?). About 8000 hours, not massively stressed for most of those, used to build rock walls and grading, etc. It has been pretty well maintained. My father passed and it has sat mostly idle since then. Now I have been using it to load out all his old "treasure" scrap iron so very low loads, low speeds, half throttle or less. Most recent day it was working fine all day (had checked fluids and were fine), monitoring gauges like always, nothing amiss, at the end of the day it suddenly began to purge coolant and foam the overflow. Lots of gas in the radiator. Still running fine. After shutdown, barred by hand, a couple tight spots, pulled glow plugs, #3 and especially #4 blew a lot of coolant on dead crank so it is a sudden and dramatic head gasket failure. It is just very unexpected, going to load it and drag it to my shop, looks like an easy job except the turbo is in front of the transverse engine and might be a little challenging to remove blind to get the head off. Just wondering why this happened, are these known for blowing gaskets? My grandfather was an easy operator though my father would push to limits when he was moving buckets of dirt but not abusive.
Yes they are known for blowing gaskets, especially from overheating. The pressure cups are known to crack. You can get heads anywhere, I got mine from Fridays Parts. There are 6 hole and 12 hole coolant differences. They say that they can interchange but I wouldn’t trust that.
Thanks for the confirmation. Just a bit unexpected since nothing much has happened since I have been running it, and my customers with similar engines in gensets, nothing much ever happens. I did do a HG on a similar Isuzu once though, that guy ran it hard. But that was heavy load over hours, this Bobcat would be heavy load for seconds when it pushes into a pile or digs, otherwise easy life.