[HO455]

Originally Posted by 57taskforce

Sounds like they could be Ajax compressors or similar. We’ve got a bunch of them...
They run on one side and compress on the other, they are actually giant 2 strokes believe it or not. They run a max speed of about 400 Rpms.

Ho455, I had a feeling that it was a 36 series but I haven't messed with them first hand and didn’t want to speculate. We looked at some 3608’s a few years ago at auction, damn they are expensive to buy and rebuild. We were looking at upwards of 100k for me to rebuild it in house if we went that direction.

I am surprised that an 3608 would be that cheap today. About 1998 we lost a turbo and it took out a piston. The piston and liner was $26,000. We got extremely lucky and didn't have any damage to the head.
The other end of the cost was the boat was down for 7 days as there were no 3600 parts on the west coast. Had to wait for a truck from Peoria. The parts at the time were almost twice the cost of a Pack for an EMD. Add in the cost of the boat being down an extra 9 days. 7 days for parts and 2 extra days of labor over replacing a Pack on an EMD. The turbo rebuild was done locally so we weren't being robbed by CAT on that.
The cost of operation was very apparent as we had 2 sister tugs, one with the 3606's and one with a pair of 12-645 EMD's. Both tugs were repowered in the early 1990's They company sold the one with CATs in 2003 and the one with EMD's ran until 2015 when we retired it.
The 3606 tug wasn't part of our regular fleet (the EMD tug was), but we got involved after it limped in on one engine when the turbo failed.