Now it looks like an engine

This week, we received the new inboard exhaust manifold from Lighthouse Marine Supply. Now we wish we had ordered both at the same time. On December 1 the manifold cost about $320. The other one we ordered this week was $367. Why? Barr (the manufacturer) isn't making as many, we were told. Maybe we're slow, but that doesn't seem like a very good reason for an almost 14% price increase on exactly the same part over a three month period. Rant over.

On Saturday, we began to re-connect the cooling hoses to the outboard manifold and elbow. We tossed all the old hoses and put in new ones. No sense in going cheap at this point. The only parts we reused were the two brass fittings that connect the manifold and riser to the heat exchanger and we had to beat those off the old manifold with a hammer applied to a 7/8" open end wrench.

On Sunday, we reinstalled the carb and the throttle linkage, a fairly easy job. It was nice to see that carb back in place with a spark arrestor that looked like brand new. It wasn't, of course, but we did clean up the old one and, although we're not telling Frances, we gave it a run through the dishwasher just to make sure it was clean.

We also finished the plumbing on the outboard side of the engine. We had the new (more expensive) manifold in the car and were thinking about how we'd lift it up onto the swim platform when luckily, our friend Rob arrived to work on his boat, which is next to ours.  He helped us heft the new manifold up onto the boat and we had a nice chat about what was going on with our boats.

Working on the inside between the engines, where we could stand and actually see what we were doing, made installing the manifold about a ten minute job. The the elbow slipped right back on where is supposed to be and the heavy part of this entire job was over.

We know this isn't very exciting, but just to see this thing mounted makes us feel like spring is here.

This shows the inboard elbow mounted on the new manifold. We reused the elbows since they are only two years old.

There are lots of little things left to do but compared to what we've been through with this head replacement project, they will be easy.

When we left on Sunday, the Connecticut river was behaving: not very high and flowing out nicely. Let's hope in continues to do that.

We've created a video that, unless you are into old boats and engines, you will probably want to skip. We have fun making them, however, and we'll continue to pollute the Internet until we arrive back at our summer slip.