Diesel Runaway Engine

Sounds good, just eliminate the air or fuel, but its not always that easy. Most runaways happen during service, or soon after. Stationary equipment is really prone to this failure. We had one happen in the shop, new truck being setup for delivery. Tech had set the idle too high, and instead of shutting it off, tried to change the idle speed on the injector pump, but with it running, there was too much pressure on the idle adjustment to move it. Kept running faster and faster, turning the key off did nothing, used every extinguisher in the shop, only slowed it momentarily, white smoke was filling the shop. Finally someone pulled off the air cleaner pipe, and placed piece of sheet metal over it. It almost stopped, but back-fired blowing the sheet metal off, and resumed the runaway. Finally stopped it by placing a 1/4" plate on the intake stack, and put a #100 sack of sand on top. We could not hear anything after the fact, and was very hard to find the roll-up doors to open, to get the smoke out.

Broke both heads and other assorted items, remember this is a NEW truck and the customer wanted the truck to work. It was almost 2 weeks to fix and get it out the door. A runaway diesel I not joke, especially if it is a large stationary that normally runs at 800 rpm max, and starts turning 2 grand, and nobody will go near it.