Utilize CAT Emissions Compliance Checklist for International B2B Buyers (earlier utilization was limited to CAT excavators within United States’ jurisdiction and did not apply to overseas facilities)

The elimination of a six-figure contract by the absence of one engine plate. For 11 days the container was lying on that asphalt, until someone opened the box. Forty one in the shade and the belly pan of the machine was still oozing a trickle of hydraulicking oil onto the concrete in a slow leak that had been seeping ever since it left the yard it was loaded from. It was stuck with dust and was a grey paste. His agent by the buyer kept his paper in a plastic envelope and held it up to the sun like a bank note, and remained silent for a long time. Then he claimed that the engine plate was missing. Not tampered with. Not re-stamped. Absent. The pad was naked, and revealed four rivet holes, and ghost of a rectangle where the paint had not cured, as in the surrounding cast iron. Simple. Brutal.

It’s been my experience that I’m going to face that telephone call twice, and there are a dozen or so times I’ve been on the receiving end of such a call and the negative rule is that no matter how much money has been put out, no matter how much money has been spent to get freight off the dock, the only remaining leverage is in the hands of the customs man or woman who has no interest in being reasonable, because he/she is the only one who knows anything — and in his regulatory world, that engine of unverifiable emissions classification is not a machine, no it’s junk with a boom attached.
The worst scandal about it all is that it had nothing to do with the physical condition on that excavator that the Buyer had carefully, honestly and competently inspected, and for which he lost it.

The following is a guide for reading the CAT Engine Plate Before You Read Anything Else.

All Cat engines leaving a factory for a regulated market had a data plate riveted to the engine block. I have seen plates chemically stripped, and then re-stamped with a likely sounding arrangement number and from two meters distance at midday you would think it to be original. When the flashlight is within 30cm, and nearly parallel to the surface the story changes. With tooling that was sharp on morning one, the stamping happened in the factory and was a single pass. Even if it is good hand stamping, hand stamping leaves character-depth variation that can be felt with the fingernail and bottoms of characters have a worked rather than clean sheared floor. Trace your thumb over its surface. This is it, the test! Nearly as much information is conveyed in the rivets as is stamped. Inspect paint paint-line at the block to the plate. After 20 years of heat cycling a hard slightly crazed film forms which becomes “feathered” with the casting texture; overlaying them with a re-painted edge is like putting nail polish on top and does not have the same heat discoloration gradient as the rest of the metal.
On the plate itself do not show the model number but instead to the engine arrangement number. Of the yards I’ve walked, plate and arrangement number discrepancy occurs more frequently than sellers care to imagine and most times, it isn’t generally fraud. So it is a straight up motor swap that was made years ago by a car dealer who has a motor sitting their core and a range of other valves with no particular thought in mind.

Data sources for the table above:https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/threads/cat-d343-diesel-generator-question.56659/

It didn’t matter so much about its condition, but about the condition of its sealing O-ring. Let me just throw out here that this is essentially where I get into a pit which most buyers will deem to be irrelevant and I’ll concede that point. It’s a little fluorocarbon ring about the size of a coin located in a groove going through a considerable number of thermal cycles, from ambient to whatever the dosing module does through the life of running it. Urea crystallizes. It not only leaks by passing a poor seal, it moves and precipitates a hard white seal in the actual O-ring groove and when formed the O-ring is no longer compressed by the gland, but by the mineral on a not uniform or predictable Seal thickness. Compression set follows. But, the ring’s sealing face is permanently flattened and after nicking, it also protrudes, from the designed position by virtue of the groove being partial-filled with crystal and consequently gets nicked again during reinstallation. I’ve removed rings from modules with a naked eye flat on the sealing face from machines that didn’t present any fault code. None. When it finally fails, it is a derate and a code — and before you know it, it’s in a container, on a ship or in the yard that the buyer’s visiting and the seller’s cell phone line is deactivated.
Truthfully, I don’t care about the ring, the size of which is comparable to that of a dime, when I’m looking to service a machine. It’s the condition of the ring which tells the truth about the machine run and how far it really went from its original delivery market. A machine that has performed its duty in an area where the urea quality has been variable and the operator tops the machine from a jug that is at hand will soon reveal this fate in the dosing circuit before it becomes apparent in the hour meter.

The second leg of the stool are the ECM serial, of which buyers say, “I don’t need it; it requires a laptop and a communication adapter and time to set it up” and ten minutes. Get the ECM serial, and the engine serial as reported by the controller, and compare both to yours, which you already have a picture of, off the plate. If all three say, “OK,” you’ve got a machine with one voice. When they don’t, you have a talk to have.