Seablossom update

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  • 10 Nov 2011 15:33
    Reply # 746729 on 710749
    Deleted user
    I torqued down the head yesterday. Thank heavens for Google... how else would I have known that 12 kg meters equals 68.7 foot pounds? I was going to put the injector back in, but it looks pretty eroded around the injection port. A new one will be just under $200.00 and I see that as a worthwhile expenditure while I've got this thing all in pieces.
  • 07 Nov 2011 00:28
    Reply # 743594 on 710749
    Deleted user
    Seablossom has her head back in place, but not torqued down yet. I spent about 3 hours total scraping the remnants of the old gasket and solids from the raw water cooling off the top of the block, maybe half an hour wiggling the head back in place, and it got dark.
    Been spending an inordinate amount of time with the sawbones lately, slowing me down. I'll escape soon.
  • 27 Oct 2011 16:17
    Reply # 734666 on 728876
    Deleted user
    Barry & Meps / Stellrecht & Schulte wrote:I'm not a diesel mechanic, so I will simply say "I'm sorry you have so much to deal with to get your engine going again." and leave it there.

    But I have replaced nearly every light fixture on Flutterby, and I can concur with most of the advice you have received so far earlier here.

    Bebi makes great LED units.  Just about impossible to beat for price or reliability.  Highly recommended.  And they are a pleasure to deal with, too.

    Bebi doesn't make many light fixtures, and the ones they do make are well, somewhere between crude and functional.

    If you don't have an existing fixture you wish to re-light....you really should consider buying a fixture with a good LED in it instead of cobbling together a fixture around a Bebi LED.  Especially for any navigation lights.  There are lots of good and cheap LED sidelights, stern lights, bow lights, etc.  Even if they cost twice what a Bebi LED retrofitted into something else would, I would still buy one of these.

    The masthead tricolor/anchor LEDs aren't affordable, or weren't when I bought mine.  I did it anyway, rather than doing a retrofit in a hard-to-access place.  But given the cost, I wouldn't criticize anybody for trying to do that cheaper.

    Barry

    When is bad news good news? I went to the machine shop yesterday to pick up Seablossom's head. Besides having it surfaced I had gone ahead and asked the machinist to grind the valves. When I got there he said that the valves were too burned and pitted to save. It could have been bad news, but I was thrilled. I was just guessing that the head gasket had been leaking, but I guarantee that these valves are too bad to let the engine run. I'll order some new ones today.
    Barry, as regards your advice, I agree completely. I did, however, buy a new old tricolor light with anchor (new as in never used, old as in the guy had it in his garage for years) at about a $300.00 discount, but I'll have to convert it to LED.
  • 21 Oct 2011 22:14
    Reply # 728876 on 710749
    Deleted user
    I'm not a diesel mechanic, so I will simply say "I'm sorry you have so much to deal with to get your engine going again." and leave it there.

    But I have replaced nearly every light fixture on Flutterby, and I can concur with most of the advice you have received so far earlier here.

    Bebi makes great LED units.  Just about impossible to beat for price or reliability.  Highly recommended.  And they are a pleasure to deal with, too.

    Bebi doesn't make many light fixtures, and the ones they do make are well, somewhere between crude and functional.

    If you don't have an existing fixture you wish to re-light....you really should consider buying a fixture with a good LED in it instead of cobbling together a fixture around a Bebi LED.  Especially for any navigation lights.  There are lots of good and cheap LED sidelights, stern lights, bow lights, etc.  Even if they cost twice what a Bebi LED retrofitted into something else would, I would still buy one of these.

    The masthead tricolor/anchor LEDs aren't affordable, or weren't when I bought mine.  I did it anyway, rather than doing a retrofit in a hard-to-access place.  But given the cost, I wouldn't criticize anybody for trying to do that cheaper.

    Barry
  • 20 Oct 2011 21:17
    Reply # 727984 on 710749
    Oh well done, Jeff.  And the Diesel 1:0:1 (is that the correct colloquialism) is much appreciated by at least one of your mechanically inept readers.

    Yes, yes, yes most certainly take your head and get it polished up!  Fantail's previous owner, in a fit of parsimony and with the boss away, told the apprentice to put the head straight back on without any fettling.  It cost me $600 a year or so later, when the head gasket started to leak.
  • 20 Oct 2011 17:07
    Reply # 727795 on 710749
    Deleted user
    The gaskets came yesterday. I have decided to take the head into the city today and have a machine shop plane it ever so little to insure that it makes a dead flat sealing surface.
  • 20 Oct 2011 02:03
    Reply # 727309 on 710749
    Deleted user
    Retrieving the Fallen Push Rod.
    Sounds like a war story, doesn't it?  "We always retrieve our fallen!"
    But it's not like that.  It's like this:
    When you look at the front of a diesel engine, all the works are in about the top half. There will almost always be at least two, and often three, pulleys there.  The lowest pulley is mounted to the crank shaft, which transmits the power of the combustion from the piston out of the engine and on down the line to, in our case, the propeller. 
    So that lowest pulley is even with the bottom of the driving parts of the engine.  There may be an oil pump or something in there below that crank pulley, but not much.
    So what, you may be wondering, is all that engine stuff below the crank pulley if there aren't any moving parts in there?
    It is, in essence, a tub full of oil.  The working parts don't run around down in the oil, at least not in any engine built in the last forty or fifty years.  That would fill the oil with bubbles, which is the last thing we want.  What happens instead is that a pump, usually driven off the camshaft, delivers that oil under pressure to all the parts that require lubrication, and from there it returns through internal passageways back to the sump, also called a crankcase or oil pan.  And what I had done is drop the push rod down through one of those internal passageways.
    My first thought was to fish it out with a telescoping magnet.  One who loses parts inside engines from time to time as I do owns such things.  But the big one on the bendy shaft was too fat to fit down through the passageway.  Oops, the skinny one on the stiffer shaft was too fat too.  Hmmm.  What is Plan B?
    At times like this it is not unheard of for me to panic and jump over some obvious fix and go directly into some massive, incredibly difficult overkill mode to recover my lost part.  I really wasn't in the mood to fall into that trap.  As I have already made clear, this engine is darn hard to work on where it is, and looks darn hard to remove to boot.
    8 bolts would drop the oil pan off the bottom, but of course the oil pan was full of oil so I would have to drain it first, which one has to do from time to time and I probably ought to do, anyway, but then again from looking at it I was unsure whether the oil pan would come out of the space it's in even if I unbolted it.
    When all else fails, read the manual.  One useful thing I got in this transaction was an original Yanmar engine service manual, and I had been keeping it close at hand to refer to throughout the project so far anyway.  If nothing else another look would give me time to recover my composure and not jump half-cocked into some stupid scheme or other.
    In there I noticed, under directions to renew the piston rings, an instruction to take off the side plate and, working through the opening, unbolt the big end of the piston rod from the crank shaft.  That meant that the side plate had to open the block as near as possible to the top of the oil sump, which meant that there were not likely to be any serious obstacles between that opening and the sump proper.
    Of course, removing the side plate required laying, stretched out full length on the cabin sole with my arms held "above" my head, i.e. what would be above if I were standing, reaching into the "engine room" and removing four bolts, two of which I could actually see.  Until I lay down, that is. I had to give blood, but only a modest amount, and the side plate generously moved aside, leaving me access to an opening as big as both my palms together.
    Back to the magnets, and starting with the big one.  I poked it blindly down into the crank case and fished around, pulling it up from time to time to see if I had caught anything. 
    The third time was the charm.  Up with the magnet came the errant push rod.
    I had to give another drop or two of blood, but soon the side plate was bolted back in place.  I had not broken its gasket anywhere in the process.  I gave thanks.
    Last modified: 20 Oct 2011 02:10 | Deleted user
  • 20 Oct 2011 01:25
    Reply # 727249 on 727015
    Deleted user
    Annie Hill wrote:Did you get the push-rod out?

    Boatbuilders who don't build boats that can be maintained should be forced to come and do some work on their creation, ten years down the track.  I have wiring cunningly hidden behind panels that have been glue in, a refrigerator that cannot be accessed, or more regretfully, removed, without demolishing the galley, etc, etc.  A previous owner has let in a large (but sadly, cheap and nasty) access hatch to get to the back of the engine, but I should hate to have to do serious work on it.

    If you can get it running, you may as well put off cockpit surgery for another year, as you say, and I really hope that you do.  Then you can get on with fun things like sorting out the rig.

    Yes, the pushrod is out. See the next post.
    There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that back in the 1950's one of the Detroit automakers sent an engineering team into garages for a year after they designed a car in which the engine had to be partially removed to replace the spark plugs. Unfortunately, I know for certain that today this very thing is happening... and they get away with it because nowadays spark plugs outlast the warranty.
  • 19 Oct 2011 20:22
    Reply # 727015 on 710749
    Did you get the push-rod out?

    Boatbuilders who don't build boats that can be maintained should be forced to come and do some work on their creation, ten years down the track.  I have wiring cunningly hidden behind panels that have been glue in, a refrigerator that cannot be accessed, or more regretfully, removed, without demolishing the galley, etc, etc.  A previous owner has let in a large (but sadly, cheap and nasty) access hatch to get to the back of the engine, but I should hate to have to do serious work on it.

    If you can get it running, you may as well put off cockpit surgery for another year, as you say, and I really hope that you do.  Then you can get on with fun things like sorting out the rig.
  • 18 Oct 2011 15:58
    Reply # 725967 on 725902
    Ketil Greve wrote:
    Paul Thompson wrote:
    Jeff McFadden wrote: Extremely well thought out.  I am jealous indeed.  Were Seablossom in the same condition I would have simply pulled the engine out and gone through it from top to bottom - it is old, and certainly worn.  Why go with halfway measures?
    But of course, the "why" is that I don't know how I'd get it out of there without cutting at least part of one of the bulkheads away, just to make space to slide it forward onto the cabin sole.  Perhaps I could get it out the companionway then, or at a minimum I could just arrange a work bench in the cabin and rebuild it on the spot, but I'm not ready for that extent of boat surgery this autumn.
    There is a guy who frequents the Yahoo Nor'Sea 27 group who has cut his cockpit deck to allow for a large hatch through which he can work, then remade the removed portion into a cover with gaskets.  I still don't think he can pull the engine through the hole, though, and I wouldn't find it that useful to have to kneel on a narrow rim and work below the level of my knees... or whatever it is he does.
    Hi Jeff, I know it is a very real pain but if you are going to do much work on your engine, it may be worth the time and effort to workout how to get the engine out and make the required modifications. You have the whole winter to do the joib, I seem to recall you saying :-)
    I guess I would say Amen to that. Think about it as an investment in less trouble from the delinquent. After all, fiberglass work is for nonskilled workmen, being more timeconsuming than difficult.

    As always on a boat:  "One job makes five!"  jds
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