Cummins ISX head gasket problem

Has anybody experienced a blown head gasket on a Cummins ISX engine, only to find that some of the cyl. liners had sunk in the block?

 

I posted this question to see how prevelent the problem is. I have heard of at least 52 case of this problem. Some were high mileage, and some were not high mileage. The latest one that I heard of is a 2010 with 300,000 miles on it. Since this owner operator did not purchase the extended warranty, Cummins will not help him out at all. Many that I heard of, (from the Cummins service rep), were 2007 trucks with extended warranty, and Cummins replaced the blocks or engines, because Cummins has no repair for it. My job is to do in-frame machining on diesel engine blocks so I was asked to machine the counterbores on a ISX engine for shims. I searched and searched for the tooling & shims for an ISX, with no success. Cummins says that they may have something available by the beginning of next year, but they did not seem to sure that it would happen that soon. So I developed a machine to cut the counterbores in-frame, & I had stainless steel shims made in .018" & .041" thick to allow me to repair these blocks. I think that reason these liners are sinking in the block, is because Cummins is setting the liners too low, (.007"-.009") which is allowing the liner to squirm in the block, thus wearing the counterbore away. I can now machine these blocks in-frame for shims, which allows me to bring the liner protrusion up to .014" which holds it much tighter. (The spec. is .007-.014") This adds a dissimilar metal (SS) between the cast iron block & the cast iron liner which reduces wear. This is not my business, just my job. My goal is to try to save truckers money, whenever I can so I developed this procedure to save them from having to remove the block from the truck & replacing it with a VERY VERY expensive new block, not counting the downtime it would cause.

 

Cummins has nothing for the ISX. They have shim & cutters for most other engines , but not ISX.