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01-25-2020, 10:00 AM #1
Turbocharged Diesels and Tolchester Marina Maryland story
The only thing I'd like better is if they said DAYTONA
Let me tell a story:
30+ years ago Caterpillar called Alan Bramble at Tolchester Marina to ask why he was ordering so many batches of mixed parts that generally should not have been used together. This was completely before you could buy a turbo Diesel in a big truck or from a marine conversion manufacturer. It turns out Alan had been bitten by the turbo bug when he repowered a boat that came in with a pair of salt damaged 400 hp Daytona 409's. When I was there visting my brother who worked there as a mechanic or was repairing an air conditioner on a boat, I always envied the better of the 2 Daytonas that Alan kept sitting on a cradle in the shop. The more Alan learned about turbos, the more he liked them and he built up a turbo'ed Cat for his personal boat. It went a LOT faster than the gasoline engine he had removed and used LESS fuel that, at that point, cost much less than gas - and periodic maintenance was less frequent and cost less per cycle. With the concept proven, he began selling the local watermen on the idea of repowering their workboats with his in-house turbo'ed Cats. It only took a few for word of mouth to spread in the waterman's community and he became THE shop for repowering. Part 2 is the Tolchester Marina shop also did major repairs and engine rebuilds for his father's road construction company's heavy trucks; Alan convinced his father to let him turbo a rebuilt Cat truck engine for the fleet. Again, proof of concept passed and the entire fleet was converted to Tolchester turbo Cats one by one as they came to the shop for rebuild/major overhaul.
By then Caterpillar suspected what was going on and asked if that is what he was doing and what the recorded results were (knowing that Alan is the kind of guy who doesn't GUESS, he TESTS and RECORDS). When he answered yes, they asked him to send notes on exactly which builds worked best. Mostly it was a matter of which turbo and injectors worked on a particular motor. Pretty soon you could buy almost all of the large Cats from the factory with a turbo - a year or two before the other big manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon. Cat was ahead because of the testing and development that had been done at Tolchester Marina.
Tolchester was also the homeport for the yacht with THE pair of Cummins BT prototype turbo Diesels. The boat owner struck a deal with Cummins at a boatshow to get the motors at a ridiculously low price on the conditions that there would be no official factory connection to the motors and that the factory would have access to the motors anytime they wished. Cummins factory crew checked on these motors every 50 hours for 18 months and at the end, came and debadged everything - all the Cummins logos, model and serial tags were removed. There was never a problem with either of them, they ran perfectly.
These days its hard to find any big Diesel that isn't turbo'ed and the reputation of the Cummins BT is legendary. All rooted back to Alan Bramble and Tolchester Marina.
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01-25-2020, 11:28 AM #25000 RPM
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Interesting history - thanks . Never heard the name before this .
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