CAT C-18 Engine Life Expectancy?

Hi,

It is not a high number of hours in the big picture.

Do you have service history and Lube Sample results? The experience I have with these engines have often shown Fuel in the Oil which is no problem if the change intervals are adhered to and the Fuel contamination does not exceed the CAT limits.

I have not had any experience with these used as Propulsion Engines.

On a boat I look after we have 3 used as Gensets with 10,000 hrs on them. Two have had the heads off recently and there was no problems found so the third was left as is. They were all borescoped at 5000 and 7500 hrs as the manuals called for the heads to come off at 5000 SMU and as we had seen others go well past this decided to see what we could get out of them.

If you adhere to the maintenance recommendations you will be replacing the Charge Air Cooler core at 3000 SMU if SW Cooled and 5000 if keel cooled.

I am encouraging the Owner to run them to 20,000 SMU before doing anything major with a borescope at 15,000.

The C18 is a great engine and has restored my faith in CAT following some really disappointing periods with some of their products.

I had no hesitation in recommending to an Owner to use these in another new build project I am involved in.

we have several c-18 a rated engines that have over 20,000 hrs on them and so far we realy like what we see we oil sample and maintain these at all the facorty recomendations

travler

Those are practically new engines. If maintenance has/will be done religously and you run her at the recommended % of WOT, they should last thousands of hours. Investing in proper maintenance will save big $$$ later on. Good luck.

Cat rates the pleasure version 1015hp, at 10,000 hours.

Time Between First Major Overhaul or the C-18 is stated as 10,000 hours for Pleasurecraft per the Cat.Marine website, but remember that includes a Top End Overhaul at mid-life (5,000 hours).

CAT pretty much spells out the all Maintenance Intervals on their website.

I would not confuse Generator hours (constant rpm/varying load) with Propulsion Engine hours (varying rpm/varying load)- there is a lot of room for "interpretation"....

Make sure you get a pre-purchase survey done! Also, get a cat guy to do your engine survey, there are a number in South Florida, but if you need a recommendation pm me.

The old head of Lazzara service works on his own now, he would be a great reference for that year Lazzara.

Best of luck!

Nicholas

make sure the engine hours on that particular 2006 model are similiar between the two engines, there is one that had a new engine installed at 200 hours, yes 200 hours due to a bad head / block. No matter what the web site or books say about 5 or 10 thousand hours there is always a few bad ones.

Best thing is to get the seller / broker to carry out a sea trial before you go spending the money on your own surveys and haul-out and that the vessel turns up to a minimum of 2300 RPM's (not 2299) and then have a factory trained engine surveyor check it out.

Do not get an independant engine surveyor who has never been on any kind of Caterpillar course and once he has done his thing have a Caterpillar dealer come to carry out an engine survey for an extended warranty on those engines. The cat. dealer technician will change the oil and filters and hook up his computer and carry out a sea trial, so long as the RPMs are over 2300 you should be able to pay thousands of dollars for the warranty.

The Cat. Dealer technician may also do a dye test for any leaks so if a factory trained engine surveyor does his thing and finds any oil leaks the dye test can be done at the same time as the second sea trial. Make sure the dye is cleaned up as it stains every thing in sight.

There are very few factory trained Caterpillar engine surveyors and a few who think they are cat. guys but are way out of touch with what tests Caterpillar are recommending in this day and age.

There are a number of CAT certified guys in South Florida to survey them, among them would be the dealer themselves, N+G Engineering, and Smith and Wick and there's another guy but cannot remember his name at the time joe Stafford I think.

Caterpillar recommends putting 40 hours on the engine after putting the dye in. By 1100 hours, a bad head or block would've shown up by now. The C18 is probably the best engine in their lineup.

Hi,

Let me know when your Propulsion C18 has done 850,000 lts of fuel in 4 yrs will ya. The Gensets I referred to above have a fuel burn of 85 lts an hour according to the Engine Mounted Panel.

FWIW: CAT apart from using SMU as a maintenance reference also use Fuel burn.

With all things considered the engines can safely be run past their book mandated hours as long as the general conditions are observed and SOS is a regular part of that maintenance, the gensets I referred to in my earlier post have been borescoped once reaching the mandated heads off point at 5000 SMU and again halfway to the mandated major overhaul and have their oil sampled and checked every 250 hrs by a CAT dealer we use called Finnings.

They consume no oil in the 250 hr run and have good cross hatch on the liners, I is my intention to run one till it actually has a major event to see just how far one will go and set the value in SMU when they do really need attention.

The next set of these engines I am able to order will come with the larger sumps giving 500 hrs service between removing the dipsticks.

What PACBLUE is saying is that the C18's as main propulsion engines in a yacht will not last as many hours as a generator. I agree with that, a generator runs or should run a constant rpm, constant temperature, and fairly constant load for hours on end, if not for weeks at a time, which is easier on the engine than being periodically run, seeing different load factors all day long, and sitting for periods of time without being run. All of the factors in a yacht are harder on the longevity of an engine, so one shouldn't expect them to achieve the total fuel burned or hours a genset engine will run between major overhauls.

Thanks, Capt. J, that IS what I am saying. Pleasure craft generators will get much longer life than a pleasure craft propulsion engine, so I just wanted to point out that the references to generator hours versus propulsion hours are an apples/oranges thing.....

For what it's worth, I believe I remember (or maybe it was just a rumor) that an old wartime GM 6-71 Generator aboard Jacque Cousteau's famous Calypso hit a million hours with scheduled maintenance and possibly an overhaul or two!

The other item to consider for the C-18 is the CAT E - rating which is considered High Performance. When building their case for Time Between Overhauls (TBO) at 10,000 hours, CAT is assuming the following for a High Performance E - Rating:

- Operating at rated load and rated speed up to 8% of the time OR
- Operating at 1/2 hour out of 6 @ up to a 30% Load Factor.
- Typical usage would be 250 - 1000 hours per year

So the moral of the story would be to keep an eye on how far and how long those throttle levers are pushed forward........

and there was me thinking I would correct the post about the HP rating to be 1001 HP or 746.5 KW @ 2300 C-18 E rated engine and then somebody gets the hours wrong by nearly a million, so 14 by CaptJ is pretty close after all.

Huh????

as usual you got it wrong, your post stated 1015 HP and it is actually 1001 but what is 14 HP, I will post a photo I took yesterday when I get back from work

Hi,

The E Rated C 18 ACERT Engine can actually crank out a bit more grunt.

Extract from CAT Promotional Material.

The Cat C18 ACERT is an in-line, 6-cylinder, 4-stroke marine engine with 145 mm bore and 183 mm stroke displacing total 18.1 liters. With its new EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) Tier 2-compliant E-rating, this engine provides 1,150 mhp (847 kW) at 2,300 rpm.

I also spoke to the CAT guy setting our engines up this morning, he told me that he looks after a pair of 500 kW at 2100 RPM C18 Propulsion Engines that have done 12000 hrs, one has evidently just started to burn oil and he feels that both will be re built within another 1000hrs or so.

While they might not go as long as ones used for electrical power generation they are an outstanding example of what CAT produces.

Your right Steve, I was off by a factor of 10 - my mistake

Hey Yachtjocky, relax, nobody is perfect, I was probably 10 years old when I heard about it!

And finally, to keep the post on target with regards to pleasure craft ratings, a CAT C-18 rated 500kW @ 2100 rpm is considered a B rating for Heavy Duty applications, with an expected operation of 3000 - 5000 hours per year. I would certainly expect this version to far exceed 10,000 hours between overhauls.......

We have a set of some of the first C18's (1015MHP) in a 61 sportfish (avatar pic) that are approaching 6,000 hours with no major problems yet (knock wood!). This is after 7 years of pretty hard useage in charter, tournament fishing and travelling. They are starting to have minor glitches like sensor failures and such and are starting to burn a bit more oil than when new so it probably won't be long now. They get their 1000 hour service (turbo cartriges, H.E. cleaning, etc.) from CAT dealers and are being watched closely.

CAT has now discontinued that C18 ACERT engine that was based on the 3406 block K1W1 gave us the specs on, and replaced it with a larger displacement block that I understand will be offered in somewhere around 1300 hp but also in the derated 1015 as well (CAT hasn't updated their website yet). I saw the last two 3406/C-18's go by the shop a couple of months ago and now all are the "new" block. I understand the change was made to meet tier 3/4 emissions and fill a gap in horsepower availability but it is a shame to see such a workhorse engine retired!