CAT 3116 swap, repower or repair?
 

This is more for a buddy of mine.

He has an early 90's Topkick truck with a 3116 and Allison tranny. It's a tandem with a 20' box and hoist he mainly uses to haul seed to the field during seeding.

I guess it started running very rough, smoking and puking raw diesel out the exhaust. Took it to the local Cat dealer and they figure An injector tip broke off and toasted it. They quoted roughly $35,000 to rebuild the motor.

I've found some other trucks with 3116's in them for $5k or so. Wondering about doing an engine swap instead.

Also wondering about repowering the truck with a different motor. I don't think the 3116's had a great name.

Any help or direction you could point me to research would be appreciated.

A swap should be fairly straight forward, the 3116s were pretty tough but fussy about settings and adjustments, I have one in an IT28G loader that has gone 20,000 hours, finally had to do injectors last winter but that's minor compared to your buddies complete engine.

If he can find another engine to rebuild at cat it should be cheaper than swapping in a different motor

$35,000 for a rebuild?
I bet he could get a crate motor for less.
Or like you said, get another truck.
Then use this one for parts or scrap it.

I'd say find a good running swap and scrap the donor rig, unless it's a better truck to begin with.

A rebuild can be a PITA to do, but I don't see 35k .... but then again, it's a Cat dealer and they've always overcharged.

When my folks had their business we used to do rebuilds all the time and costs were nowhere near that kind of cash. Find yourself a good shadetree mechanic or someone that knows how to rebuild Cat engines and keep it as a spare. This way is the swap decides to kick the bucket you'll have a hot swap spare and can rebuild the donor motor and make it the hot swap spare.

The truck has less than 60,000 miles.

It seems these 3116's are junk. Lots of reading on the net about 3116 problems.

20,000 hours on the loader is good though. I've heard they work ok in industrial applications but not so well in the marine and truck apps.

they liked to have the valves and injectors reset every couple thousand hours or so, my local cat dealer told me they're fussy but tough especially in the lower HP applications.

How many hours or starts are there on the truck to get to 60,000 miles?

there is a newly rebuilt 3126 on the cat used site for a lot less than 35,000, is it just that cat doesn't want to have to do it? haha

the symptomology sounds very similar to my loader when it started having issues in December, ran like crap, smoked and you could almost taste the fuel in the air when you started it, took it to town, 6 mew injectors, reamed the injector cups, complete overhead reset and it runs like a top, all for $6500, tell your buddy to rip the head off of it and have a look

Was that at Finning in Calgary BlkMegacab?

Finning in Red Deer