Monthly Archives: June 2009

Rebuilding Hydraulic Cylinder for Adjustable Backstay

Posted on by

As I mentioned on an earlier post, the seals on the backstay cylinder were leaking. of course after I had mucked with it it was worse, so I knew I had to rebuild the thing.

After taking the cylinder off the backstay, you have to dismantle it by removing the end cap. this is held in place by a small allen screw. The larger one holds the seal cylinder in place and also must be removed.

There is a tool available for taking off the end caps, but unfortunately I don’t have it. Considering this is the sole hydraulic on my boat, it’s not an investment I would make. I don’t like that it scratched the finish and in retrospect I could have wrapped it with duct tape first.

The end cap just screws off.

First thing is to dig out what’s left of the dust gasket (not much).

Because the gasket had crapped out long ago, salt and rain water had puddled in the unit, causing corrosion. fortunately, this surface doesn’t actually contact anything so no real harm done.

With the cap off you can see the sealing cylinder. It’s held in place by the hose fitting and the large allen screw.

This cylinder holds the seals for the actuation rod.

You have to remove the hose fitting before you can pull out the piston.

The piston seal. There was about 1/4″ of oil in the bottom of the cylinder which isn’t much after twenty years. It appears to be in good condition but might as well replace all the rubber parts while I’m at it. I was able to source parts from Coast Industrial (Navtec would have been waaay more expensive). About twenty dollars to reseal the unit.

The hose fitting has to be sealed with teflon tape or a liquid equivalent before reinstalling.

Once reassembled you pump up the ass end of the cylinder with a bike pump.

Good to go. twenty bucks later and it should last another twenty years.

I also decided to fix the engine alarm system. Turns out there were problems (of course). First of all the low oil pressure fitting was all corroded up and there was no contact with the spade fittings. Like I say in my book, friction-fit spade fittings have no place on a boat. the wires should be soldered to the fitting. The other thing I discovered was that a PO had replaced the alarm but installed it without paying attention to polarity. It will not work wired backwards, which is why it didn’t go off when the engine overheated. People who don’t know what they are doing should not work on their boats; that mistake could have cost me an engine and I would have been talking to lawyers.

Update on my previous post. Success! The engine runs at a nice cool 170 degrees now, at least 20 degrees cooler than it has been. I think the problems have been building for awhile now.

Overheating marine diesel

Posted on by

As I mentioned on an earlier post, while trolling a few weeks ago my aux engine overheated. Fortunately the engine was idling and it seemed like no damage was done. I went through the cooling system to try and find the source of the problem. given that it only overheated while idling and not during full throttle, i suspect something in the heat exchanger system. If it was in the fresh water (engine) circuit, the opposite  would be more likely – overheating at higher RPMs.

I made sure the raw water screen was clear and then checked that the raw water pump impeller hadn’t lost an impeller. No problems were found.

I knew that this engine still had it’s original thermostat, so although it was counter-intuitive to the symptoms, i decide to replace it anyway.

Replacement from Lordco. No way was i gonna pay Westerbeke prices. I brought in the old one and they were able to match it up. The original is a British Leyland part.

Although I replaced the thermostat, i had no faith that this was actually the problem so I next went to the heat exchanger. It’s in a bad spot on this engine, and unfortunately you have to pull the entire manifold to remove it, so I serviced it without pulling it, although it was very awkward. The copper tube under the fresh water reservoir is the heat exchanger.

To clean out the heat exchanger you have to pull the rubber cap off the end. It’s held in place by a large hose clamp.

The inside of the heat exchanger; someone has given it a good wallop. The copper is very soft. I was very surprised when i pulled off the copper and a chunk of zinc rolled out. I had checked the engine’s pencil zincs just a few months ago and they were fine. The base of this zinc had dissolved and the remaining chunk was rolling around in here, blocking at least a few channels.
 
Not only that, but some channels were plugged by bits of shell. The red arrows point to plugged channels. You can just make out the fragments in the picture. Between the zinc and these clogs, I suspect the heat exchanger was down about 1/4-1/3 capacity

Two months ago, this pencil zinc appeared fine. From now on I’m replacing them every 6 months regardless what they look like; zincs are cheap. This was new last October

Reaming out the channels with a length of clothes hanger wire.

After cleaning out the channels (and straightening out that dent. I’m surprised it didn’t leak),  I decided to replace the zinc in the transmission heat exchanger.

No problem here, but of course there is much less copper to protect.

I didn’t get a chance to put it all back together but I’m gonna try tomorrow. I’m pretty certain I’ve discovered the source of overheating. I do wish that the engineers had built more capacity into the system but you gotta work with what you got. It’s this aftermarket Westerbeke bolt-on heat exchanger system that has caused pretty much all the troubles I’ve had with this engine: heat exchanger clogs and raw water pump problems.

One modification I have to do is in the electrical – this old system has no key switch and you start the engine with a push button. Once the engine starts the generator supplies power to gauges and the alarm system which is obviously not working. But with that arrangement there is no alarm test; there isn’t that buzzing you get with most boats before the engine starts or when you first shut it down. I’m gonna rewire it with a keyswitch so i can hear that the low oil pressure and high temp alarm are working. There is too much going on with a sailboat to be having to watch engine gauges all the time.

Government Beat on SUmmer Camp Clawbacks

Posted on by

We had a meeting after our sunday gathering and several of us wrote letters to the Minister Rich Coleman decrying the planned cutbacks to poor and disabled children’s summer camp. Within a few days the clawback was rescinded, a small victory for the voiceless and powerless of this province. Of course we have no idea how many letters and phone calls the Minister received, but I like to think our 15 or so letters was a big part of it. Certainly it was public pressure that brought the about-face. A small moment of justice and fair play as far as I’m concerned.

My buds and i recently ran off a new batch of hooch. As mentioned on an earlier post we bought a food-grade still and began making our own spirits. Not because of a latent alcoholism but to pull one over the feds, have fun, and join the ranks of our bootlegging forebearers. Not that we bootleg it, but the “spirit’s” there.

We’ve run off a few batches of wine which produced an interesting fruity result. You couldn’t call it brandy, which it technically was, but enjoyable nonetheless and had an alcohol content of somewhere near 50%. It’s expensive using wine though, so we made this last batch a sugar mash. 20 lbs of sugar and “turbo yeast” gives a final alcohol content of about 20%, which is a lot stronger than any wine and costs less than 20 bucks. We then ran the mash through our still set as a reflux column  (the wine went through it set up as a pot still which maxes out at about 60% alcohol and allows lots of flavour to pass through), which gives an ethanol concentration of 95%. Pure fuel, that. I tried a bit as it came off the still and it was so warm that it literally evaporated off the tongue (after stripping off the skin). My friend swigged a mouthful and spewed it all over everyone. You cannot drink it at that strength.
The idea is to cut it back to about 40% with water and add extracts to flavour it. For that 20 bucks of sugar and yeast we got a gallon of ethanol after the heads and tails were discarded (the bad stuff that makes you blind or sick). That’s about ten bottles of spirits once mixed down with water and flavoured. I bought cherry brandy, gin, grand marnier and spiced rum extracts, and they are very good.

Some people might be appalled by the idea of running off your own spirits but the only reasons that you can make homemade wine and beer but not spirits is because of the strength of the liquor lobby, and that nobody has demanded the laws be updated (laws which date back to the prohibition era). Distilling is very simple, and as for the potential health issues, every distiller knows that you throw off the first and last part of the batch because this contains the toxins. You can also get very sick by leaving potato salad out, and yet making potato salad’s not illegal.

I’m seriously thinking of taking off to Barkley Sound next week. I would be going alone as Tracy has to work. It would do me good to get away I think, and I’m craving the West Coast and the open ocean. I need to get Satan put back together and still want to replace that seal from the backstay cylinder, just because. This would be my first cruise alone.