Tough day at the office

That's certainly not something you see every day!

Will you rebuild it or find another engine?

If the engine isn't an interference design, you might have dodged a larger bullet as the rear pistons might have been out of time with the camshaft

And I thought I was having a bad day because the John Deere mower gas tank sprang a leak!!:rant:

A two piece crank can ruin a day completely. Best of luck getting it fixed and running again. Whatever you decide it will be expensive and time consuming.

Looks like a 3304.

Yep 3304. Definitely not a common occurrence.
This is a machine that I had not done a lot of hours with. It was burning way to much oil but had good oil pressure still, so I decided on doing an in-frame job on it. New pistons, liners and rings, and new valves and valve guides.
Replaced the connecting rod bearings seeing as they had to come out. Old bearings looked near perfect.

Engine fired up and ran nicely. No smoke and no shakes and rattles. Fast forward about 30 hours and I got a call to say there's a funny noise coming from the engine. . .

So far upon closer inspection it turns out that the con rod journal where it broke has been welded up and ground back to size, so it seems there was obviously some mis alignment going on here or an old crack.
The block doesn't appear to be damaged but I will send it in to be checked out for cracks and make sure the main bearing tunnel is true and also check the connecting rods are not bent.
These older machines aren't plentiful around here so I'll be rebuilding it if the block checks out ok.

Hi Team,
as a heads up from what I recall at the Dealer as we sent the cranks out to a specialist repairer/grinder.

From memory and as these cranks are high stressed in some applications and so the crank Journal radius's are Fillet Rolled with a special tooling to compress the metal in the radius's to make them less prone to cracking in the high flex areas--in effect the radius becomes undercut.

If welded, I seem to recall the crank needs to be stress relieved, shot peened, heat treated and possibly then nitrided and fillet rolled--not necessarily in that order and maybe not all processes.
Cat will have a Special Instruction for the re-weld procedure and so forth--if indeed they even allow it.

I stand to be corrected.
Cheers,
Eddie B.

Back in action...

Lifting only with 3 poles? You have my respect.

That tripod has done more than its fair share of work over the years. Isn't usually a loader or excavator around when things go south out in the sticks. The worst part is that the machine was in the workshop with concrete floor and lifting equipment two weeks before.