well I know I’ve created a bit of controversy with the last post but it’s legal to delete machines here so I’d like to share with you guys what I can do.
When I see this...……..all I can think about is how many thousands that would cost me and the length of the prison term I'd end up with. But PLEASE proceed!
Yes I understand that for you guys to the south. We are fortunate to be allowed to do it here because it’s the only way to have a chance to make some profit and get the full use out of a machine that has a price tag of over a million dollars new. 80% of downtime here is caused by emissions.
Agree 1000%
What pisses me off is that our government didn’t really asked “we the people” before they passed this malarkey! I understand the argument about representives, but I don’t remember my senator and congressmen asking my opinion!
That’s the truth. The end users are the ones suffering. The client/customer doesn’t compensate downtime due to government decisions on implementing EPA RULES. The client/customer assumes that you should just have another piece of equipment in your back pocket to bring out to take the place of your broke down machine due to emissions. Has anyone challenged this crisis to government? Let’s not even bring the dealer service side into topic...the millions that people have spent on dealers service techs mis diagnosing problems...oh boy is this going to open a can of worms by pressing post...but it is the TRUTH!
I think people getting together and starting to do something about is a good idea! This and national “right to repair” law!
I still maintain that what will eventually happen is the same thing that happened with gasoline engines 40 years ago. The diesel emissions technology is still in its infancy really. I remember the first time I saw a diesel with an EGR valve back around 2005. The first DPF around 2008. So we've really been doing this for about 10 years. Things have gotten much better in that time. They will continue to do so. I think the progress was really stifled by the great recession, which came around at the time these systems were being rolled out. My dad has told me about what it was like in the late 70s and early 80s when car builders were experimenting with fuel injection and catalytic converters. The systems were primitive and unreliable. Mechanical air flow sensors, mechanical fuel injection pumps, very primitive computer controlled ignition etc. Dealers did not know how to fix them. It was the wild west of OBDI where every OEM had their own interface. Mechanics were longing for carburetors and distributors. Indeed many cars and trucks were converted back to these old systems. And, most of those early systems are long since in the crusher, where they belong. I had a 1987 F-150 with fuel injection. That truck left me walking no less than 6 times in 6 years. Fast forward to the mid 1990s and suddenly we seem to have things pretty well figured out. OBDII makes it possible to interface with almost any car. We have fuel injection figured out to the point that mid size cars are getting 30MPG. We start to see things like 100,000 mile engine warranties. Back in the 1970s, an engine with 100,000 miles was on borrowed time if it had not been rebuilt at least once before. Jump to the modern day. My wifes Toyota has 200,000 miles on it. I've replaced three oxygen sensors, two batteries, two sets of brake pads, and one set of tires. That's it. I've never even replaced the spark plugs, which I should have done years ago. It still gets 25 mpg, which is great for an SUV. It's never broken down or needed to be towed. Anyway, given the appropriate amount of time to mature, these diesel emissions systems will become equally reliable. I'm sure when my son is my age he'll just laugh at the way we are doing it now. Once these things are really working correctly, no one will want to go back.
Wes, I agree entirely on gas engines, it was bad, and now it's so much better than it ever was. I HOPE there is light at the end of the tunnel with regards to diesel engines. I'm not in that game and will avoid it at my age and low level of involvement. 90's tech for me. Maybe clean diesel will work, maybe diesel will only be left in ships and the third world?
Wes I can remember when PVC valves showed up on cars some thought that was crazy too complicated! I've often said that trying to force changes too fast is one of the big problems. Expecting the engineers to reinvent the wheel every couple years is what is causing the most trouble. I think if we had started getting serious about the environment maybe ten years sooner and ramped up to where where we are now in regulations over that longer time frame we might have given the engineers the time needed to figure things out. And if there was a financial incentive added to the regulations where if a manufacture was able to exceed the minimum standards by say 10% they would get a cut in taxes or preference in bids to supply equipment it might also help. Of course that would have to be tied to a dependability standard.
The emissions targets in the 1970s were attainable. The emissions targets for these tier 4 engines are ridiculously low. Designed to clean up the LA basin and places like that. They are beyond what anybody would ever want or think necessary in normal places. We all need to educate ourselves on what they are asking for. Something like one teaspoon full of CO per year of operation. Maybe not quite that extreme but you get the drift.
I’m all for cleaner air ( although I’m not sighing up on the notion that this problem is THAT BAD) by improving engines characteristics, like better infection misting, variable valve timing etc. But putting exhaust gases back in to intake or burning more fuel to supposedly burn unburned fuel than adding ammonia to it which makes exhaust gases even more toxic! It’s downr dumb in my understanding! But the main stupidity of the whole thing is they go after little bitty trimmer and chainsaw, but afraid to make a peep against biggest polluter!!!
Really, though, the whole system of laws that causes/allows this to happen is broken. If somebody is damaging somebody else's lungs then they should be sued person to person. Not somebody in Washington DC deciding that all machines shipped to Montana and Alabama and California and Alaska have the same unreasonable requirements. Unelected permanent bureaucrats strangle the life out of everything. More health issues caused by poverty of unemployment due to high Tier 4 costs I should imagine, than leaving things Tier 3. But no way to measure that.
The law is the law. Only thing you can do now is vote for people of like mind to better represent you where the laws are made.
The problem I see is too many want to do away with all regulations, be them environmental or safety regulations. They would have us back to the early 1900's where miners were being killed at a rate of over 1,000 per year! And that doesn't take into account of the deaths from black lung! And for air pollution do we really want to go back to the times when a truck pulling a grade poured out such a heavy cloud of black smoke you could loose sight of it in front of you? Or where that lake near me that used to have fancy tourist hotels on it was poisoned so bad that even after spending millions of dollars dredging and covering up the crap on the bottom they still have to post signs telling people not to eat fish caught in the water. Of course the people who made millions off the companies that dumped the crap in the lake from their factories are long gone along with the jobs they took with them to go pollute someplace else!
With all respect, I don't see it that way...remember that when the government regulators set a target for safety or pollution or whatever, they are effectively saying that x number of deaths that their regulations didn't cover are acceptable. And of course the assumptions that they use to tune their regulations are always going to be faulty and politically motivated and have political carve outs. We need a whole paradigm shift where the injured parties sue the injuring parties and take away all their money, companies, etc. That is lightyears away from where we are now but with the trajectory of where we are now, we will be living in the wrong kind of country in the future to have any kind of control over anything. Burning billions of dollars and man hours on this stuff is not progress, it is just throwing bricks through windows and then paying to replace them over and over.
The problem I see with that plan of attack is "Dead Men Can't Sue No One!" plus the fact that even if they are "only" injured a miner working in a coal or other mine probably can't afford to hire a lawyer good enough to take on the multi billion dollar company. The company can just keep delaying things in courts till the injured person does die! I see we are now on the path to where child labor laws will be looked at as infringing on the rights of a company to make a profit.
The law is the law. I don't know too many people who would say they want dirty air. In my mind though what no one says is cleaner air "at what price." Does cleaner air have to come at the expense of small to mid size businesses just trying to make payroll. No one wants contaminated water to drink. But then again everyone wants lots of cheap fuel achieved by way of fracking. No one wants to see people getting hurt at work. But then again what happens when a job needs half a dozer people to sign off and watch a single person do something like open a valve or close a switch. Someone gets hurt on the job and it is immediately the fault of the employer. Never mind the doe head unlatched a safety harness and climbed up on the rail of a lift because he couldn't reach something. The fall didn't quite kill him. So who was at fault there. The employer hired me to inspect the lift after the "accident" for the potential lawsuit. What is missing is common sense and our lawmakers have little enough of that. The bulk of politicians get in office because not enough people care to make sure the right person gets in to do our work. Maybe make voting a priority in the future. Your well being depends on it.
Don't forget to toss some of the blame on the manufacturers. These big companies like Cat and Navistar all tried to pretend that they were completely caught off guard by the emissions regulations. It's not really the government's fault that these companies failed to do the R&D that they should have done to reliably meet the emissions targets that they knew were coming. It was not a secret. In fact, it seems like most of the American companies could not be bothered to develop these emissions systems. They just licensed or relabeled systems developed in Europe. I read an article about the many lawsuits against Navistar over the junk Maxxforce engines they pumped out. One of the higher ups basically said "we never tested them". Well that was a great idea. Now when you buy an International truck it has a Cummins engine. Guess that worked out well...
If a man is killed then the persons responsible need to be put on trial for murder. If found guilty the appropriate punishment. And I don't mean jail time. Miners and such know what safe operation is like. If they don't like it they are free to quit and move on. If the job market is bad then move away. I know that around here experienced miners are very hard to come by. But whatever the problem may be, bureaucratic solutions are not the answer.
this isn't about cleaner air...……….……………….its about farmers and their corn and also about political payoffs. india, china, Russia and other countries do what they want . our efforts ( I call them efforts ) don't make squat.
While not the only solution I feel it IS part of the solution. If there are no laws saying what one can dump on the ground or into the air we would be living in a large toxic dump in the matter of years. You can not tell me that say a major company like General Electric did not have dozens of scientists who knew that dumping PBC's in to the Hudson river was not going to cause environmental problems down stream. https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/pcbs/ And this is but one example of what companies will do if there are no laws or regulations prohibiting it. Another is the infamous Love Canal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal And to say if a miner doesn't like working in an unsafe condition he can just up and move, are you saying all the coal miners in Kentucky, West Virginia and other states really chose to die by getting buried alive or from Black Lung?
Hey guys.... I didn’t want to start this thread to end up like this. I just wanted to show what I do in Alberta Canada where it’s allowed to. This is not a political forum is it?
I will refrain from any more sidetracks other than to say: not getting political is what gets us into messes like this. The Other Side knows they can depend on us to refrain from making too much noise when they foist yet another small layer of nonsense and waste onto us who are too busy working to do anything about it. So we end up with engines where the aftertreatment is larger than the base engine, and they don't know or care because they have not so much as changed the oil on their Prius. But they do sometimes complain when it costs $100,000 more to build their house than they were expecting.
It would be great to live in world where people were responsible and took ownership of their actions. But, there's a percentage we are just never going to be able to count on. I'm reminded every time I go to a store and see the number of shopping carts that people were too lazy to even move to the cart corral or the amount of trash that's left on the sides of our roads after the snow melts.
Making noise here, or Instagram, or Facebook or on any other internet forum does nothing but make more noise. Make noise by personally talking to people and making points at the polls. We had a saying in the navy, "a bitching sailor is a happy sailor." Making noise on the internet indicates we are all happy?
It’s hard to keep all the people happy all of the time. As a member of my local community forum we get people coming with complaints every meeting. One of the main ones in our community is the state of the roads. Council gets a budget increase from higher rates and starts repairing the roads properly right down to the sub grade. Next meeting same complainers are back complaining about traffic delays from roadworks. Ausdave
Bet that is the same many places. Problem here in north east USA is there are only two seasons: Snow and road construction. But as I spent about 45 years working in a stone quarry that produced grit to go on the snowy roads and materials to repair them in the warmer months I won't complain!
Hello. Where can I view what steps you have done
Six year old thread.