After our trip to Florida it was back to New Bern to
find out what was wrong with our starboard engine. Pat arrived late Tuesday afternoon and
decided it would be best to start fresh on Wednesday morning.
First a little back ground on our engines, you
understand of course that I am not a mechanic, Wayne handles that, I write the
Blog, so this will be nontechnical terms.
Being a catamaran we have 2 engines.
They are 35 horse power Yanmar Diesels.
They are raw water cooled, meaning they use the water we are floating in
to cool the engines. They no longer make
this style of engine because salt water causes corrosion. Now back to the story…
When we tried to start the starboard engine so Pat could
see how slow it started, see the smoke it created and hear the noise it was
making…it refused to start…not a good sign.
So he pulled the top of it off (the head to those of you who know
engines). He immediately saw that a push
rod was bent. He suspected he would find
a bent push rod because that is what normally causes the clanging sound we were
hearing. If this had been the only
problem he could have fixed it and gone home that day…but something caused it
to bend. The normal cause is a water leak.
He dug further and found everything was clogged and corroded. Not
good. This meant a rebuild.
Pat called a friend in Ft Lauderdale to see if they had
an extra core so he could start with that to make the rebuild quicker. They did not have a core but they did have a
rebuilt engine. Pat told them to put his
name on it. After hearing the price we
agreed that was the way to go. (The
price was cheaper than the estimated cost of doing a rebuild and you already
know the cost, when you do a rebuild the costs are unknown…which is scary). Transportation
was arranged, the rebuilt engine would arrive early Thursday morning. Wayne and Pat took our engine apart preparing
for the new one to arrive. To keep this
short, the rebuilt engine arrived on Friday.
The surprise was that it was a fresh water cooled engine. The “footprint” is the same and it came with
all the parts that make it different from a raw water cooled engine. Simply put we got a better engine than we
expected, so we were happy. The engine was
installed in just a few hours and runs great.
So we now have one fresh water engine and one raw water engine.
Pat took the old engine with him and over the winter
when he is not busy will see if he can rebuild it. We have two engines so we may need another
one.
This is a picture of Pat putting parts back on the 'new' engine after having to remove them so the engine could be lowered through the hatch.
Saturday we spent resting and spending time with friends
that we will not see again until we return in the spring. Now that the engine was running it was time
to work on the autopilot. Wayne
installed the autopilot without any problems.
Tuesday was a beautiful day. Sue
and Mark from Patience joined us for a ride in the river to calibrate the
autopilot and give the engine another test.
Both worked GREAT !
After provisioning runs, lots of clean up, several trips
to West Marine and a trip to the Yanmar dealer buying spare parts, replacing
the lens on the tricolor and giving the deck a final scrub we were ready to
go. Weather predictions were saying
there would be a blow on Thursday night with low morning temperatures, so
spending Thursday night at the dock seemed like a good idea. The winds were supposed to lay down in the
early afternoon on Friday and it should be a good day to leave. Plans were made to leave on Friday afternoon.
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