My uncle and I bought a Ranger 33 in late October. The engine was supposedly running 8 years ago when the boat was last in the water, but it looked like a rusting heap and I figured it would make a good winter project (can't do much else to the boat in the snow...)
What follows is a photo essay on how we got the engine out of the boat, and tore it down. I relied heavily on reading posts on this website, so hopefully my experience will help others with similar tasks in front of them.
Getting the motor out of the boat:
Lucky for me, I was able to borrow an aluminum gantry crane and chainfall from work. The aluminum I beam was light enough that two people could easily move it around. It made our task much easier. First we built a wooden support for the I beam over the cabin top, then used one of the regular gantry feet in the cockpit:
This got the motor all the way to one of the cockpit seats, then we had to reconfigure the gantry to get it the rest of the way down to the ground:
Most of the challenges we faced getting the motor out have been pretty well documented on this site - rusty motor mount bolts, hard-to-remove exhaust flange, etc. One thing that got us stuck for a while was that even though we couldn't remove the large nut on the motor mount, we did manage to get the two smaller nuts that held the mount to the fiberglass rails off, and we figured that would be good enough. No dice! Those mounts were glued down! After 20 minutes of 'why is the back of the motor stuck???' we finally got out the sawzall and cut through the mount.
More on the tear down in future posts.
What follows is a photo essay on how we got the engine out of the boat, and tore it down. I relied heavily on reading posts on this website, so hopefully my experience will help others with similar tasks in front of them.
Getting the motor out of the boat:
Lucky for me, I was able to borrow an aluminum gantry crane and chainfall from work. The aluminum I beam was light enough that two people could easily move it around. It made our task much easier. First we built a wooden support for the I beam over the cabin top, then used one of the regular gantry feet in the cockpit:
This got the motor all the way to one of the cockpit seats, then we had to reconfigure the gantry to get it the rest of the way down to the ground:
Most of the challenges we faced getting the motor out have been pretty well documented on this site - rusty motor mount bolts, hard-to-remove exhaust flange, etc. One thing that got us stuck for a while was that even though we couldn't remove the large nut on the motor mount, we did manage to get the two smaller nuts that held the mount to the fiberglass rails off, and we figured that would be good enough. No dice! Those mounts were glued down! After 20 minutes of 'why is the back of the motor stuck???' we finally got out the sawzall and cut through the mount.
More on the tear down in future posts.
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