Reinstalling: satisfying but not much fun

When we last left the saga of Bill & Frances' winter boat rehab project, we had assured ourselves that the starboard oil cooler wasn't blocked and that entailed installing a new hose from the seacock to the oil cooler.

This week, we got the port starter back from Joe's Auto Electric. It was explained to us, as we lightened our wallet by $185, that the drive in the starter was worn and that John, grandson of the original Joe, changed it because he thought that "we wouldn't want to be going back down there anytime soon." God knows, he was right.

We'd guess that the starter weighs 20 lbs or more and it certainly looked like new as we lugged it up onto the deck and prepared to reinstall it.

Having the rebuilt starter back allowed the whole process of re-mounting the heat exchanger on the port side to begin since we can't access the starter with the heat exchanger in place. If you have a boat, you'll understand this.

We installed the starter with only moderate difficulty although we spent a lot of time laying across the back of the port engine simply trying to line up the starter close enough to start the two mounting bolts.

Then it was time to mount the newly repaired port heat exchanger. The heat exchanger mounts on a U-shaped bracket that bolts to the reverse gear. We had sanded, primed and painted these brackets and figured they'd go right back in. Armed with all new hardware, we did get them installed but every bolt required spaghetti-arms. Just that bracket took us almost 30 minutes, but eventually, it was bolted down and ready for the heat exchanger.

If you're wondering about that crusty Y-fitting on the cooling hose shown in the photo, yes, we're going to replace that too.

The heat exchanger bolts to that bracket with two 9/16" one-inch long bolts but those holes are just big enough to accept the bolts so there was a half-hour of laying between the engines and trying to line up those two sets of holes without letting the exchanger slide off the bracket and fall into the bilge. Guess we should have bought slightly smaller bolts.

Finally, the heat exchanger was back to where Silverton put in in 1980, now with a new life (we hope).

We stuck the hoses back in place just for the photo.  When we change the exhaust risers in a couple of weeks, all those hoses will be replaced.

The more we get into rehabilitating the cooling system on these engines, the more we realize that we can't really re-use any of the old hoses. The hose from the seawater pump to the heat exchanger wouldn't seat properly and we replaced it with modern wire-reinforced hose.  The hose from the bottom of the heat exchanger to the engine circulating pump was also shabby when closely inspected and we'll replace that too. These are relatively short sections of hose (3-4 feet) so replacing them isn't much of an expense, although getting them off the old fittings after more than 30 years is time consuming torture.

Keep in mind, these are what we call "invisible" repairs because everything worked just fine when we took the boat out of the water in November. With all of this work behind us, nothing will be different except when we're out in the open water, we'll be fairly confident that something won't break.