[CAT® OIL & GAS] Meet a G3600 Guru

Sergio Tigera: Welcome to the Cat® Power Podcast, where we deliver powerful insights into the world of Caterpillar Oil and Gas. Showcasing the latest in technological advancements and highlighting the stories of the industry's most dynamic leaders. I'm your host, Sergio Tigera. Now let's get ready to power up with the Cat Power Podcast. And welcome again to the Cat Power Podcast. My name is Sergio Tigera, I'm your host. And today we have a very special guest because we're celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the G3600 engines. We have Mr. Al Hunt. And so, Al is a retired Cat dealer technician, who invested in dediCated 45 years of his life to helping customers succeed using Cat engines. And today we're reminiscing with Al about his time with the G3600 engines. During his time with the Cat dealers, he helped commission over 300 G3600 engines, and is still regarded as the world- renowned expert in this line of engines. And he retired in 2009 officially, but he continues to share his expertise with both Cat and gas compression operations nationwide. So coming to us from Irvin, Texas, Mr. Al Hunt. Welcome to the show my friend.

Al Hunt: Hi, Sergio. How are you doing?

Sergio Tigera: Doing great. Doing great. It's so great to have here on the show.

Al Hunt: Thank you.

Sergio Tigera: So let's get started here. Let's take it back to the beginning. You started off a number of years ago. Tell me what that was like as you were growing up? And what was your first gig with the Cat dealers and your introduction to the Cat world? Tell us a little bit about that.

Al Hunt: Well, my dad worked for Louisiana Machinery back in the 50s. And my first encounter, I guess, I worked around the house, did some spare jobs and whatever, and he was going to have to take off, my mother was going to have surgery. And times were different back then, and he made a deal with the service manager because he didn't want to lose his overtime. He asked, could I work in his place for two days while he took off with my mother and surgery. And so, that deal was struck. So I work two days in my dad's place, so he keep his overtime. And then the next Monday I went to work on my own. And always kidded him. I said, you know-

Sergio Tigera: So wait, how old were you at that time?

Al Hunt: Oh, I was still in high school, probably 10th or 11th grade.

Sergio Tigera: Nice.

Al Hunt: I always kidded him. I said, "You know, I don't think you ever paid me for those two days I worked in your stead." He says, "And you know what, I'm not going to."

Sergio Tigera: I'm not going to.

Al Hunt: But we laugh about that a lot-

Sergio Tigera: Tax in the mail. It got lost in the mail.

Al Hunt: But that was my first deal with Louisiana Machinery. Then I worked for them during the summer and then I worked for him for several years before I came out to Texas and worked for Dar.

Sergio Tigera: Wow. And so when was the first time that you got introduced to the G3600? When you first saw that? Tell me about what that was like.

Al Hunt: Well, we made a trip. Knew it was coming, but made a trip up to Mossville and they didn't have any gas engine running, but went up to the tech center and they had a Diesel 3612 running. And I had not been around one at all, and they had this one running, and we walked into the test cell and it was an awesome feeling because you could just stand on the concrete, which is pretty stable in the test cell, and you could feel the engine vibrations coming up through your feet, along with other emanations of noise and power. One thing I've learned with a 3600 is that sound is a very powerful force. I've always liked to commission the first 3600, but it was always tough to commission others while the ones their own site were running. Being around running engines all day long will really buffet your body and make you tired. That sound really does physically work on your body.

Sergio Tigera: And so, when that first came out and you commissioned the first one, you brought it to the customer site. What was that like? What was their reaction like?

Al Hunt: Well, they were kind of surprised, it's big and we never had a product that big, the G399 was the largest gas engine we had had total. But they were all really surprised, walk around and," What's this? And what's that?" And all wanted to learn about it and hear it run.

Sergio Tigera: And so, when they brought it out, obviously when a new product comes out, there's usually some skepticism, some doubt," Well, how is this really going to work? This is the biggest engine that's ever come out here."" Is this really going to... Were there any doubters at that point?

Al Hunt: Oh yeah. I remember Casey had one of our packagers, sold several G3606s to Union Pacific in East Texas. And that company had a record of letting their technicians be involved in some major purchases and so forth. And whenever they had their input, they said," Well, we're not sure we want that new product, because we don't know anything about it." They had some walk shells and it had some old slow speed integrals and so forth. But they kind of inaudible, they didn't know about it, so they didn't want that, didn't want to learn on it. And so, anyway, management made the decision, they bought, I think there were seven engines on that site and we commissioned all of them. We got them all running. And because East Texas, all of our dark territory I was responsible for. And so I made a visit back after where they'd been running for several weeks, and I went back over there, and I said," What do you think?" They said," Well, we still don't know anything about them but we sure do like them, because we don't have to work on them every day." It was kind of strange, but the fact is that that company, they had three techs on site. They had to have that to keep them running. And they reassigned two techs after they got to G3600s. And so their time required to maintain uptime was greatly reduced.

Sergio Tigera: Yeah. So the uptime increased tremendously from the previous models, right?

Al Hunt: Absolutely.

Sergio Tigera: And so, what was the reason for that?

Al Hunt: Well, reliability. The G3600 of course, the first one was in ESS and it had a control system, which was a mixture of a number of different components from other Cat products. And it was unproven, had a lot of wires, a lot of connections, but the reliability of running and maintaining air fuel ratio and emissions and so forth, it was not hard at all to maintain 95, 98% runtime.

Sergio Tigera: Wow.

Al Hunt: It turned out that the Achilles heel was all the wiring connections though. One of the things that we always did on commissioning was go through the wiring system and make sure we tightened every screw terminal and every junction box everywhere. We found a lot of the packagers would use a little pocket screwdriver and doing the interconnect, and they couldn't put enough torque on the screws to maintain the tightness. And so it was standard fare to go tighten all of those. I don't even remember how many counts, but it was a lot of them. And we tighten all of those, and suggested that at least first three months might not be a bad idea to tighten them up a little bit more.

Sergio Tigera: Yeah. Just to make sure.

Al Hunt: Yeah.

Sergio Tigera: And so, how many hours a year where these engines running?

Al Hunt: Oh, they run 24/7. So you wind up with a maintenance time, you approach 8,500 hours, something like that they run all the time.

Sergio Tigera: Wow. Yeah. And with that uptime and reliability, you can actually do that. So it saved the customer lots of money and time and headaches, right. So they can focus on what their real job is.

Al Hunt: Right, right.

Sergio Tigera: So then, over the years, you've commissioned over 300 of these. What was the biggest jump in terms of technological improvement that you saw that was the most impressive to you?

Al Hunt: Well, it ran on just about any fuel that the customer had to use. It was not hard to get the engine set up. One of the things that I found, it was very important to have some pre-commissioning discussion with the construction crew, so that all the piping and all of the other support items have the right completion level, so that we didn't have a lot of wait time when we got there. So I never had a lot of issues with commissioning because I've made it a point to always talk to the construction manager, foreman or whatever, and say, "Now, here's the checklist. Whenever you get all of these things done and we can come do commissioning and it'll be done in short time. And we'll have a good time."

Sergio Tigera: Now when, when they from the ESS to the A3 update. What about that?

Al Hunt: Yeah. So that was a big step. I was involved in some of that conversation. We were involved in two G3612 conversions up in the panhandle and do some field testing. There was also a G3616 in South Louisiana. But we converted those, and the biggest thing about the A3 was the moving all of the wiring, reducing terminals off the engine. When the engine runs, it has a lot of high frequency energy in it. And that was one of the big things that caused terminal screw loosening, and then wire chafing, so forth. And so, we actually moved all, but about a half a dozen screws terminals off the engine with the A3. So, that the wiring issues were non-existent. I tried to keep track of it a little bit, and I think the first wiring issue I heard about was nearly a year after the engine had been introduced to the field. So we had a lot of A3s running by that time, but it just stopped all of the wiring issues. Now, the strategy of the A3 was almost the same as the ESS. What Cat had found is that we need a little more control of the low load air-fuel ratio. So they put a feedback loop on the choke, so we could set a desired exhaust temperature and the ECM would automatically take care of the air fuel ratio at low load, whereas before with the ESS, we had a fixed position choke, and the technician set that up during commissioning. And sometimes if you were going to run at that low load, which was before, below 40%, then you had to go back tweak the choke position, but that was the functional improvement in the operating strategy. But the biggest thing by far was eliminating all the wiring terminals and so forth.

Sergio Tigera: Yeah. And the turbo changed as well, right?

Al Hunt: Well, that was a big change too mechanically. The old VTC turbocharger was an axial radial turbo, and the hot turbine end wasn't designed to share the deposits that built up out of the exhaust stream. And we did well to run eight, 10, maybe 12,000 hours with a VTC, and then you'd have to at least tear it down and clean it, they call that a level one repair. And we were involved with the turbo change, whenever Cat went to the TPS, we had one test turbo in East Texas, we had one in Oklahoma, and those two ran to 30,000 plus hours without any attention. So it was a big step as Cat tried to make the turbo life match top in repair life. And so the TPS does that.

Sergio Tigera: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, like anything in life, right? You're only as strong as your weakest link.

Al Hunt: That's right.

Sergio Tigera: And so, that's something that was a big change there. And then emissions come into play in a big way in the industry. And Cat continues to step up in terms of technology and meeting requirements and so forth.

Al Hunt: Right.

Sergio Tigera: Get into A4 upgrades. So then tell me a bit more about that and what happened there?

Al Hunt: Well, the A4, again, if gas wells are drilled and the product comes to the surface, you deplete the supply in you're drilling new wells and finding new formations and so forth. And in that course, a lot of new hotter gas, higher BTU gas, if found and put into the production mix. And high BTU gas is a little more sensitive in the combustion process, to detonation. And if you, if you have a lot of high BTU gas, then you're going to have a lot of detonation. And that nation runs to downtime, with Cat's detonation sensitive system. If you didn't have that, then you'd have some piston damage and a lot of issues there. So the A3, while it was reliable and had a very good run time and everybody happy, it wasn't being a nine to one compression ratio, it didn't like hot gas. And customers had an opportunity to input the Caterpillar. What do you want to improve on the 3,000 gasser? And their number one issue is, "We need to be able to burn hotter fuel." That was the number one issue, because it take a lot of gas fines in the Northeast and South Texas and other things, the BTU is just way too hot. And so, they'd have to run de-rated. So they couldn't utilize all the horsepower the engine had the capability because it run into the detonation. So that was the number one issue, run hotter. And of course the number two issue is emission-

Sergio Tigera: Was that problem in particular to Texas, or just in general?

Al Hunt: No, all over. Anywhere, the fuel supply became a higher BTU, there was an issue. Not only the G3600, but G3500s and all of them, but we're dealing with a G3600 and have to approach that and see what the technology and how can we make that better. And it turns out that a more complex combustion strategy comes into play with a different compression ratio and different cam profiles and are able to fool the engine and make it think it's a lower compression ratio than it really is. So we were able to, Cat was able to burn much hotter fuel, and maintain rated horsepower. And of course, as the A3 came along, we had a horsepower increase across the product line. And A4, again, we had about a six to 8% horsepower increase. So in addition to the horsepower increase, we still had a better challenge to keep detonation from happening.

Sergio Tigera: Interesting. So you've been around these engines for 40 plus years, 40, 50 years, a lot longer than most people have been married. What is it about these engines that have kept you so passionate? And you stuck with this for so long. Tell me about that.

Al Hunt: Well, in my career with the Cat dealer, I have always had an opportunity to be a first in a lot of things. First TC, Technical Communicator, I was always doing projects, testing transmission. First half of my career was earth moving, so I had a lot of experience with tractors, motor graders and things. So I was always working with Caterpillar Engineering and testing components, and even in the field fallow program, complete machines. Place it at a customer site, and she how it works. And it was a win-win situation for the customer, a free machine, and for the dealer, we were able to learn about new product quickly. And so, that when it was introduced, our field technicians already had some awareness of the new product. And of course, always develop a good relationship with the Cat engineering folks and knew him, talked to him on a daily basis. And as the old saying,"broke bread" with a lot of them and, and became friends with a lot of them still today.

Sergio Tigera: Yeah. You've had an amazing career with the Cat dealers and that whole family relationship with Caterpillar, and it is impressive that you've stayed with it for so long, especially with one category and one line cause that really represents legacy and continuity and loyalty, that those are kind of words that describe the relationship between Cat dealers and their customers, right?

Al Hunt: Right.

Sergio Tigera: It's longstanding,"We're going to be here by your side" type relationships and deep knowledge, which is another thing that you don't see too often anymore. People staying with one company or with one industry, one product line for so many years. So congratulations to that on your tremendous career.

Al Hunt: Thank you.

Sergio Tigera: And as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of this great piece of technology with the G3600 that has helped so many customers and folks out there. So any final words about G3600, or your time with Cat and the dealers as we wrap up.

Al Hunt: Well, I have always been involved in problem solving, even though I had a lot of different titles and jobs. But it seemed like engine and gas engine, particularly products came to me. And so I've always been involved in sharing information with technicians, both at the dealer level and the customer level. And as time goes on, you learn more. At Dar we always had a policy as the G3600 began to show up that, we gave some training to the customer when he got his first engine as a part of support for the packager and part of the support from the dealer. inaudible a lot of engines went somewhere else, not in our territory, not in our packages territory. And so I became acquainted with a lot of dealers and dealer people in Wyoming, and Colorado, and New Mexico, and wherever they went, because those dealers didn't have an opportunity to sell engines and they didn't have an opportunity to learn about them. So training is always been a partner in my commissioning exercises. So with that in mind, FYI, even today, I get a lot of phone calls and emails, Facebook has a couple of websites that have technicians asking questions and so forth. And so, I'm on that, monitor those questions and sometimes have input. Bobby Reynolds, which is kind of my partner here in longevity. He's on that sometimes too. And so we like to share information with our technicians. Life's tough enough without making it harder, so we like to make it easier for them and help them understand the right way to use the literature and what training they need and so forth. And when they're successful, a Cat product's going to be successful, and we're going to stay ahead of the pack.

Sergio Tigera: Well, you've got the heart of a trainer, teacher and leader my friends. So thank you so much for your time. We couldn't have done it without you all these years with the 3600. So you're a big part of that life.

Al Hunt: Well, you know, you think you're indispensable, but think about this, when you think you're indispensable, just get your bucket of water and stick your fist down in it, and then pull it out and see how long it takes to fill in the space where your first was.

Sergio Tigera: There you go.

Al Hunt: It's fun to be a part of things and so forth, but life moves on. And so, we just do what we do.

Sergio Tigera: Fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate you being on.

Al Hunt: All right. Thank you.

Sergio Tigera: Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow and rate us. And be sure to share it with a friend so that you can power up their life and their career.