Diesel Generator Oil Change Without Stopping

Back in the late 50's early 60's one of the logging companies close to where I lived in Idaho went to Canada to log for a few winters. It would be embarassing for me to repeat verbatim how cold the loggers said it was...lets just say it was very cold.

They told stories of how they never shut the equipment off because it would never start again and they told of how they changed oil while the engines were running.

What they did was install shut off valves in place of the drain plugs on the engines and in the lines going to the oil filters. Back then most of the engines used remote Luber-Finer filters.

To change oil in the engine, they would open the drain valve while pouring new heated oil in the engine from 5 gallon cans. Oil was cheap back then and they would pour it in until it looked clean coming out the drain. It seems to me that a lot of the Cats could be running when you checked the oil level. I'm not sure about the trucks, but they were loggers...they figured something out.

They simply shut the valves on the oil lines going to the filters when they wanted to change them.

As a side note: It was widely reported it took a bottle of Seagrams a day to keep the boss thawed out.

You could change oil the logger way, it just might be a little spendy these days though.