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Old 03-15-2012, 09:33 AM
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ILikeRust ILikeRust is offline
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It always makes me wonder what the designers were thinking, the way some of these boats are laid out. I guess they either didn't think that far ahead to the day, years down the road, when some deep maintenance might need to be done - or just didn't care, as it was not their problem.

On my boat, the stuffing box is tricky to get at. In theory, it seems you should be able to get at it by lying head-first in the aft quarterberths, but in reality, two things prevent you from getting at it that way: (1) it's farther away from you than you think it should be, so unless you've got orangutan arms, you're not going to reach it, unless you can bend your body down in there and get yourself closer to it, and (2) the cockpit drains prevent you from bending your body down in there and getting closer to it.

So the only way to reach the stuffing box is by lying across the top of the engine and reaching through the hole in the aft bulkhead and stretching as hard as you can - and even then, it's tough to do. It's really interesting doing it with the engine running and the prop shaft spinning. Last time I did that, I accidentally pushed the big, fat battery wire onto the spinning alternator sheave and suddenly heard a loud crackling sound as it cut through the insulation.

And then there's the waterlift muffler. I plan on replacing the old Vetus with something better - probably a Centek. I still have very little idea how the hell I'm actually going to do it. I can't figure out how the person who installed the Vetus did it - but I presume they did it when they installed the new engine back in 1983. And I now realize I should have replaced the damn thing while I had the engine out - it would have been way, way, much, much, far, far easier to do. Now it's gonna be like a game of Twister from hell.
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