Wayne,

The Racor is essentially a hose, a pump, and a filter. On larger boats
they usually make up a system using a suitable pump, hard piping, ball
valves, check valves and a suitable filter (sometimes a duplex). This
allows them to use the same system to refill the crankcases from drums.

They burn the oil along with the fuel. The lube oil, BTW, acts as a tiny
fuel booster as it has more BTU content than DF-2, or so the big boys tell
me.

These boats also have twin generator sets one of which is always running.
However, the engines are so small that the oil is usually changed the old
fashioned way.

A point of interest is that the oil on the larger diesels is usually changed
based upon the recommendation of the oil analysis lab. Most engine oil is
changed much more often than nesessary if based upon a set number of hours,
miles or days.

Butch
"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:39:02 GMT, "Butch Davis"
wrote:

On towboats and larger, however the overall labor, disposal, etc. savings
can be considerable. Those EMDs, KTAs, Cats, FBM, etc. larger diesels
hold
considerable oil in the crankcases. 55 gallon drums are the oil
containers
of choice on those big boys.

No doubt. I assume they are burning their used oil? Do they use the
Racor blender or something similar?