Hi Craig! Hope you and Katherine are well. Where y'at?
Kent
Hi Kent, We're back in Boca for the winter and Katherine is back to her part time job while I keep Sangaris in shape. She's on a mooring in Vero Beach where she limped in a few weeks ago (the boat, not Katherine). Funny story that other Amelians may enjoy.
As we were motoring down from Melbourne the overheat alarm went off. I jumped down into the engine room and spotted a steady stream of water coming out in the vicinity of the circulating water pump. That's not an underway repair job so I just topped up the cooling water every five minutes with the cockpit shower hose, until we got to Vero Beach a couple of hours later.
The water pump had failed years ago in Mexico at about 3500 engine hours. The Perkins shop manual says it is not repairable and must be renewed, but the Mexicans in a little shop in Baja did fix it for about 80 pesos and it was fine. I did replace it after getting back to the US, when I rebuilt the engine (in the cockpit in Ft Lauderdale!) So, assuming the replacement pump had failed, not surprisingly since we've now gone another 3500 hours, I ordered one from Trans Atlantic Diesel in Virginia.
Went back the next week and pulled the engine, since replacing the pump is far easier that way than attempting to do it with the engine in place. The pump is behind the timing belt cover and you have to pull the cogged pulleys of the crankshaft, camshaft and injector pump, plus the timing belt and idler pulleys to get the cover off. Then you can finally remove the water pump. Then reassemble everything, put the engine back in the engine room and reconnect all the plumbing, electric etc.
So, got that all sorted and refilled with antifreeze. Son of a gun if she wasn't leaking just as bad. So, lifted the engine out a second time, stripped it down again and discovered the leak hadn't been from the pump after all - bad assumption on my part. It was a freeze plug on the engine block just below the water pump that had corroded through. Those are 84 cents at the auto parts store - yikes. Anyway, put it all together again, plopped it back in the engine room, filled it up and it didn't leak. That was the good news. The bad news was it didn't want to start, although with lots of preheating and cranking it finally got going, but ran really rough with lots of smoke. A sure sign of the timing being off - likely because I put timing belt on one cog off.
So yesterday I just finished hoisting the engine out for the third time, moved the belt over one notch, reassembled and tossed it back in the engine room. Now works like a champ. Great fun and have set a new Guiness World Record for speedy engine removal - 1 hour, 52 minutes and 23 seconds.
Cheers,
Craig
