Semi blew its turbo today

[Richard]

One of our Penske trucks blew out the turbo this morning. I happened to be right around the corner so I figured I'd check it out. Wanna talk about smoke!!! The driver was trying to get it in a good position for parking and there was a solid 20ft plume of white/grey smoke coming frim the stack. You couldn't see anything for at least 2 blocks downwind. When the smoke cleared there was a car half up over the curb a little ways down. People came out of their houses to see what was going on. The driver said that it was his third blown turbo in a Mack. Sucks that I didn't have a camera nearby. It was quite a sight.

[gt2.5turbo]

i was driving home the otherday and there was a bigger truck/small semi that you could see the hotside of the turbo as i past him going up a hill... thing was BRIGHT BRIGHT red. pretty neifty stuff. ya its too bad you didnt have a camera i imagine the cloud was huge

[scuzzy]

Yeah, I've seen more than a few trucks blow turbochargers.

It's just that the seals let go, and either coolant or oil starts pumping into the intake - performance goes to shit in them, and in some cases if it's oil, you have to set the parking brakes and dump the clutch to kill the engine


Drive the hills of east tennessee and you're bound to see one or two trucks dead on the highway, still thumping along at a really rough idle as the engine runs dry and the driver hasn't the first clue what has gone wrong.

[206er]

Ive heard that macks are generally pretty unreliable?

[Richard]

They're built like a brick and can pull a house but you suffer a little in other areas. Comfort used to be not so good and reliability still suffers a little. Most trucks are pretty well balanced and usually have very few bugs. The digital dashes in Volvos are notorious for pissing people off though. All in all, its pretty much just driver preference. That and how they treat it. The guy who drives the Mack beats the dog shit out of it. Well, actually every truck he drives gets a workout. He really likes Macks though. Good thing the trucks he uses are rentals.

The psycho, nit picky, ultra left-wing nutjob drives one of the company trucks. He points out everything that is wrong or seems out of place. I'm suprised he doesn't bother me when there's a bug stuck to the thing that he can't get off. But the truck rarely breaks down.

Oh yeah, I just recently got my class B liscense. Hoorah.

[douglas vincent]

I watched a Portland Oregon TriMet bus lose a turbo once. WOW

Started smoking slowly, not so slowly, fast, FAST, FASTER, OH MY GOD!!!!!!!