I Finally Found the Cause of My Cummins Engine's Bent Pushrods

Hi everyone, Charlie here. We had an incident occur today that I thought provided a good opportunity for me to take a moment to talk about professionalism and getting the most out of an education that you're probably paying for or at the very least are investing a large amount of time in. And what I see more and more often are students who are putting forth, you know, very little effort into learning the stuff that they're coming to a trade school to learn. And it's not just automotive or diesel like I'm involved in, but other trades as well. And so what I got in my hand right here is the perfect example of what happens when you have students who aren't taking learning seriously. So this is a push rod out of a Cummins that you can see, unlike the push rods are supposed to be straight, this one is not exactly straight. So what happened to this push rod? Well, a lot of this is conjecture on my part, but I can't think of any other way this could have possibly happened other than this. A group of students was putting an engine back together and when they went to install this push rod into their block, they missed the lifter and it went down into the block. That's completely understandable, especially if you're a student because it does happen. But the problem I have with a situation like this is that a reasonable student who is there to learn is going to come to their instructor and say, hey, Mr. Charlie, I put this push rod in and it went all the way down in there and I'm not sure how to get it out. And then the instructor, who even if he doesn't want to admit it, has probably done the same thing, knows how to get that out of there and will show them and they learn from their mistake, which is what the school is for, to learn, right? So what this group did instead of doing that is they probably went to another lab group and stole a push rod or pulled over on some unsuspecting instructor that we didn't have this push rod when we took it apart and got another push rod. They put the engine back together and left this one sitting inside that block. This thing was sitting in the block right next to the camshaft. So then as soon as other lab groups and next classes come along and start to do labs where they need to rotate the engine, that camshaft is rotating against this thing and it's trying to roll this guy around the cam and the engine was hard to turn over. And it's been that way for a little while. And I finally had a lab group where I was, you know, remembered to and asked them, hey, take a good look at this thing and see what the problem is. And they found this guy stuck inside the block with this part right here sticking right below the sleeve inside. And we had to basically hammer it out of the block because it was seized in there and wedged between the camshaft and the block. So you can see this is a pretty thick push rod, right? This guy is not bent easily. So not only did they initially have to go through all the trouble to hide the fact that they left this push rod in there, the next group of people who initially rotated the engine had to put an unreasonable amount of force rotating that engine over to get this push rod to bend like that. So it was multiple failures in multiple classes, probably over a long time. And again, not just on the students, this is partly instructors. It could have been one of my courses where I was too busy or distracted by something else and didn't, you know, put two and two together. But you got to trust your instructors to be willing to share with you what to do when you make a mistake, right? And take this stuff seriously so that you can learn. So, I mean, think about this. You're going to a school to be a diesel mechanic. Would you rather make this mistake at the school and have an instructor explain to you, hey, this is how you would get this thing out of there? Or would you rather just cover it up, make the same mistake in the field, and have the truck come back with this inside of it as a return? You probably wouldn't be keeping your job very long. So again, I know this sounds kind of preachy, but it's things I think new technicians need to hear is that, you know, there's mistakes, there's learning opportunities, and then there's just laziness and ignorance. And this kind of falls into that category. So don't be this type of person, right? Be the type of person who's going to come and help get an instructor to help fish it out before it becomes a major problem. So, thank you for watching. Please like and subscribe. Let me know if you guys have any questions or any topics you want me to cover, and see you later.