Today was the day that I decided to tackle putting the engine back together! (after the obligatory run to Ace Hardware, of course…). I started by reassembling the heat exchanger:
I was about to reinstall the entire manifold when I realized that the bolts that hold it in place were still rusty and gross. I didn’t go through all of this effort to clean and repaint the engine only to put rusty bolts back in it… so they’re outside on the deck drying along with the thermostat housing that I forgot to clean up and paint!
The only other part that’s clean and ready to go was the turbo inlet pipe, which looks nice at the back of the engine!
Since the manifold was still off the engine and the raw water pump was super accessible, I decided I would go ahead and swap out the rubber impeller that is responsible for the flow of cooling sea water through the engine. When Jason was on the boat for the sea trial, the motor started easily, but the cooling water wasn’t pumping, so he had to shut it off. We checked some other scenarios that might have caused the lack of flow, but it turned out to be the easy solution: the impeller had flung itself apart inside the pump! These things are meant to be changed at least yearly. This boat has sat for at least two and who knows how old the impeller was before that…
Fortunately after a little clean up, the new impeller installed easily and the system should be ready to rock once everything gets reconnected!
The motor is now at a standstill until I can get some more parts gathered up and some paint dries, so I decided to clean up the bilge area underneath the engine. It had years of rust, zip ties, oil spills, and crusty goop… a shopping bag full of paper towels later and it looks almost good as new!
Can’t wait to see what the engine looks like tomorrow when it will be even more fully assembled!
After spending most of the day working on the boat, it started to get too hot to be comfortable so we came back to the apartment. Luckily, the apartment decided to open the POOL! I finally got to swim!
