Winterizing x2 advise

[Wisakedjack]

I am looking for an advise on the engine winterizing. I ended up not putting my boat into water this season. Instead I am doing some work this summer, which was long overdue. The engine was winterized last fall and I've not touched it since. The question is whether I should leave it like this until next spring or run it on the hard and winterize again this fall. Any advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[W2ET]

Do you know/trust what was done last time?

Who did the work?

Bill

[sastanley]

I would not start it...just spray some MMO in the cylinders and turn it over by hand with no plugs in it, if you have a hand crank without 'pumping' all the antifreeze out, to move some oil around in it. I see you have a C-30..you will need to drill a hole in the seat to get to the flywheel pin to do this..you could also flip the starter a bit but that could move some of the antifreeze out of the raw water side if you crank too long. I would drain the muffler before starting next spring after this exercise just in case some antifreeze moved thru and filled the muffler up.

[Wisakedjack]

W2ET I do all the maintenance on the boat. So, I always know what was done Shawn, thanks for the advise. I do have an access to flywheel, so I can just turn it by hand. Many thanks for the advise.

[sastanley]

A couple more thoughts from the peanut gallery now that we have more info.

I don't worry as much about air in the parts of the cooling system as I would frozen sea water. But, if you really want to keep the cooling system pickled, you could place a funnel full of antifreeze on a short piece of hose on top of the raw water pump intake so that as you spin the motor by hand, antifreeze that gets pumped out into the muffler gets replaced...again, remembering to drain that extra antifreeze from the muffler so it doesn't have a chance to backfill up the short hot stack on our C-30's when you do restart it next time.

[Al Schober]

Winterizing a raw water engine is always iffy - fine until it isn't. Replacing an engine with a cracked block convinced me to install a heat exchanger and go to glycol cooling. I recommend going to glycol cooling - easier to do it if you do it before the block cracks!