Sunday, July 17, 2011

Getting ready to go

We plan on traveling up the Bay for a short weeks trip with stops in Solomons and Annapolis MD.
We are attending an open house for OR and hope to meet up with some friends, Ray and Susan Cope.

However there  were a bunch of maintenance things to get done before heading out, 53 to be exact, Wheelhouse technologies helps me keep tabs on the scheduled maintenance. So for the past week I have been earning my keep and doing the list.

When we brought the boat back from the yard I noticed that one of the engines was running a bit hotter than normal at WOT (wide open throttle). So I cleaned the sea strainers, which were not bad. After that I cleaned the heat exchangers using a small steel rod that I ran through the tubes. There was a bit of small grass that may have been the problem.











Here is a close up of the exchanger. Fresh sea water flows through here and the engine coolant surrounds the tubes and the heat is transferred. Much like your car but using seawater instead of air.

The sea water is pumped from a sea chest through a Groco 3000 sea strainer to a water pump and into the exchanger. Then out the boat.  My engines run a bit cooler than most diesels, I average about 165 and at WOT a slight increase to 170 or so.








I changed all of the zincs, which are sacrificial anodes to take any stray current. I do this about once a qtr. You can see how the new zinc sits in the heat exchanger.

There a total of two on each engine








Here are the old ones that I took out, you can see they are spent. They did there job!















There are zincs on the heat exchanger for the ZF transmission. You can see the head facing to the right between the the water intake hose and the first oil in hose.















Next up was the zincs of the heat exchanger for the hydraulic system, you can see the bolt head sticking out of the right side.














Included in changing all of the zincs was to clean the sea strainers for each unit. That requires closing the Groco sea strainers. This is the port strainer valve, a Groco 3000 coming into the sea chest. This pic is looking down at the top of it as it enters the sea chest.
There are a total of 2 3000, one 1500 and 3 1200. Each one to be opened and the wire basket removed and cleaned and replaced.






The past few days I changed 7 racor fuel filters, you can see then as the 6 of them if you look closely, they are tall and white.














A look at the port engine after all is done and put back together












Almost all of the chores are done and tomorrow is general clean up and provisioning. We are looking forward to a fun trip.

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