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Bah...almost the perfect weekend - but the engine quit
Well, here goes my weekend story...
My wife & I took the boat up the river this weekend & met up with some friends and rafted up. We sailed most of the way, and the engine ran admirably when we needed her on Saturday. Maybe 30 minutes to get out of the creek & maybe 30 minutes to get into our anchorage.
We ate, we drank, we swam (no sea nettles yet, in August, really!?!?) - all were merry.
It is blazing hot on Sunday so we decided to leave the awning up and motor sail home with the 155% genoa. (why not, the engine has been running great, except for that little drip from one of the side plate studs..I'll fix that soon.)
Engine runs at 1,950 RPM happily churning along for almost 2 hours..Then she starts to sputter & cough for a minute or two and then she just quits. It is a sailboat after all, so we are now sailing, but, there are early afternoon storms building all around us & we have a big genoa & the sun awning up.
So, I take down the awning, which takes about 10 minutes, and fire the engine up again, and she instantly starts, so I put the genoa away before the rain/wind arrives and she runs for 10-15 more minutes at 1,400 RPM or so and sputters for a minute & quits...crap. "OK, honey, be sure to turn the key off & let's head over here out of the channel while we still have some steerage."
So, now we are coasting in the harbor and the sails are all put away, and there's thunder & a little sprinkling of rain & the wind is swirling around and it is not very conducive to sailing in the creek to the dock. I had just mentioned to my wife that if the engine quit again, we'd toss the anchor and wait for the questionable weather to pass. So, we coast out of the main channel and deploy the ground tackle, (Oh great, underground cable area too!
) - & we let her cool off a bit & proceed to start the packing up of the boat to cut down on the time sweating at the dock later.
We have let her rest for about 30 minutes and the storms are still building, but beginning to move out to the Bay. The occasional sprinkle (just enough to close the hatches) & swirly wind is still happening, but it is clearing & calming down. We are now about 12 minutes from the dock...the engine instantly fires up again, so I yank the anchor (full of mud but no time to clean it..I figure we have 15 minutes tops of running time) and off we go at 1,500 RPM. Normally, I take a long leisurely stroll in neutral past the dock, so I can rev the engine up in reverse and practice my backing techniques in my quiet creek, but not today..as we come around the last bend and the pier is in site, I throttle back a little and she's starting to sputter but she's still running..that historically has meant about 1 more minute of run time. Today, we'll get as close as we can to the pier so we can grab a line if necessary.
She runs long enough to back into the slip and is coughing and sputtering as the first lines are made fast. I give her a pat on the head and shut her down, and thank her for getting us home again, even if the anchor locker is full of mud. I'll come back down to the boat tomorrow and clean all that up.
The storms have passed, it is 95 degrees in the shade, so off to the pool for the afternoon.
This shut down episode seems eerily familiar to the coil failure from two seasons ago, so I am blaming the coil (again)..I have it mounted on the engine bulkhead, and I even haven't bothered to reinstall one of the doors in the engine room, so there is plenty of air flow, but the coil was really, really hot...too bad I didn't have my infrared thermometer with me though.
Shouldn't we expect a $35 Flamethrower coil to last more than two seasons? I probably only have 50 hours on the thing! Any idea what the normal operating temperature of these things is supposed to be? The original coil, hanging on the engine, lasted 31 years.
This week, I am going to pick up two coils (since I never thought this one would fail while I owned the boat, I haven't bought a spare yet) and install them both in the engine box..Then, I need to figure out some way to switch between the two like they do in NASCAR. Although in reality, since I've added the (+) & (-) bus bars in the engine room, there are only one or two wires on the coil anyway..switching over would take about 60 seconds with a 3/8" wrench.
My wife & I took the boat up the river this weekend & met up with some friends and rafted up. We sailed most of the way, and the engine ran admirably when we needed her on Saturday. Maybe 30 minutes to get out of the creek & maybe 30 minutes to get into our anchorage.
We ate, we drank, we swam (no sea nettles yet, in August, really!?!?) - all were merry.
It is blazing hot on Sunday so we decided to leave the awning up and motor sail home with the 155% genoa. (why not, the engine has been running great, except for that little drip from one of the side plate studs..I'll fix that soon.)
Engine runs at 1,950 RPM happily churning along for almost 2 hours..Then she starts to sputter & cough for a minute or two and then she just quits. It is a sailboat after all, so we are now sailing, but, there are early afternoon storms building all around us & we have a big genoa & the sun awning up.
So, I take down the awning, which takes about 10 minutes, and fire the engine up again, and she instantly starts, so I put the genoa away before the rain/wind arrives and she runs for 10-15 more minutes at 1,400 RPM or so and sputters for a minute & quits...crap. "OK, honey, be sure to turn the key off & let's head over here out of the channel while we still have some steerage."
So, now we are coasting in the harbor and the sails are all put away, and there's thunder & a little sprinkling of rain & the wind is swirling around and it is not very conducive to sailing in the creek to the dock. I had just mentioned to my wife that if the engine quit again, we'd toss the anchor and wait for the questionable weather to pass. So, we coast out of the main channel and deploy the ground tackle, (Oh great, underground cable area too!
) - & we let her cool off a bit & proceed to start the packing up of the boat to cut down on the time sweating at the dock later.We have let her rest for about 30 minutes and the storms are still building, but beginning to move out to the Bay. The occasional sprinkle (just enough to close the hatches) & swirly wind is still happening, but it is clearing & calming down. We are now about 12 minutes from the dock...the engine instantly fires up again, so I yank the anchor (full of mud but no time to clean it..I figure we have 15 minutes tops of running time) and off we go at 1,500 RPM. Normally, I take a long leisurely stroll in neutral past the dock, so I can rev the engine up in reverse and practice my backing techniques in my quiet creek, but not today..as we come around the last bend and the pier is in site, I throttle back a little and she's starting to sputter but she's still running..that historically has meant about 1 more minute of run time. Today, we'll get as close as we can to the pier so we can grab a line if necessary.
She runs long enough to back into the slip and is coughing and sputtering as the first lines are made fast. I give her a pat on the head and shut her down, and thank her for getting us home again, even if the anchor locker is full of mud. I'll come back down to the boat tomorrow and clean all that up.
The storms have passed, it is 95 degrees in the shade, so off to the pool for the afternoon.
This shut down episode seems eerily familiar to the coil failure from two seasons ago, so I am blaming the coil (again)..I have it mounted on the engine bulkhead, and I even haven't bothered to reinstall one of the doors in the engine room, so there is plenty of air flow, but the coil was really, really hot...too bad I didn't have my infrared thermometer with me though.
Shouldn't we expect a $35 Flamethrower coil to last more than two seasons? I probably only have 50 hours on the thing! Any idea what the normal operating temperature of these things is supposed to be? The original coil, hanging on the engine, lasted 31 years.
This week, I am going to pick up two coils (since I never thought this one would fail while I owned the boat, I haven't bought a spare yet) and install them both in the engine box..Then, I need to figure out some way to switch between the two like they do in NASCAR. Although in reality, since I've added the (+) & (-) bus bars in the engine room, there are only one or two wires on the coil anyway..switching over would take about 60 seconds with a 3/8" wrench.
- It ran 1,950-2,000 RPM..I was working her hard, but in smooth seas with some help from the genoa. Maybe it would have run 3 hours if I had babied her at 1,300 RPM all day?
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