579 MX13 tips, tricks and advice

You have to remember they will have started devellopment around 01 or earlier.
First ones were sold in 06.

 

Bypass coolant level sensor? I wish I could yank the beeper! Going off for nothing is getting me upset.

 

Pull the sensor straight down out of the tank and tape a magnet to the top of it. If the beeping quits, float is stuck in the tank. If it doesn't, sensor/wiring issue.

 

Where is float? What a stupid design.

 

Float is part of the tank. Non serviceable. Will have to replace the tank

 

Here's my $.02 on the paccar motor after having 4 of them in my fleet for a year. We pull a gross of 129k with these trucks and all things considered they do ok. Plenty of power to pull just the normal hills that we have a long the wasatch front here in Utah. They don't seem to use much oil and honestly we have had very few problems with the dpf systems. Our trucks are all 15 and 16 579's.
That being said here's the downside. I have one in the shop right now with 560k miles on it that looks like someone dropped a grenade in one of the cylinders and blew out a softball sized hole on both sides of the block. This one is now junk and the core is not even worth anything. At 515k I had another one that developed a crack in the head. Paccar was actually pretty good about it and covered the $20k repair. I can tell you that if I didn't have a scanner to clear codes on these trucks i would be screwed. They are constantly de-rated due to sensor issues that never turn out to be an issue. Every truck i have gets hooked to the computer at least once a week and codes cleared. I keep track of these codes and very rarely do i get codes that reoccur.
Pulling this kind of weight we dont expect good fuel mileage but on average they are 1-1.5 mpg worse than our 550 Isx motors. Every truck has gone through a fan clutch or two and 3 out of 4 have had multiple coolant level sensors replaced.
If they figure out the sensor issues on these trucks i honestly think they'll do ok. The blown engine leaves a bad taste in my mouth however. I hope this helps someone

 

Do you know what caused the blown engine?

 

Driving in derate sucks.

 

At this point it looks like the bolts on the clamp that hold the push rod to the crank worked themselves loose and caught the side of the block. That's really just a guess at this point as the crank is still intact as well as all the other rods

 

If or when you know more,can you post it?
And how Paccar handled the costs.