Over the winter I vacillated over whether or not I should replace the cutless bearing this year. It was clear that it really needed to be replace, as the shaft could be moved quite a bit by grabbing the end and giving it a shake. Still, I was worried about the can of worms I might be opening up if I pulled the shaft out of the boat. For those of you with a literary bent, consider this to be foreshadowing!

Ok, ok, so it hasn't been *that* bad... yet!

Basically my plan was to pull the prop, remove the shaft from the shaft coupler, replace the bearing, replace the packing in the stuffing box and throw the whole thing back together again. No problem, should be done in a day.

Everything is Seized Up

The trouble started right at the beginning. I pulled the nuts off of the end of the shaft and tried to remove the prop. No way! The prop was stuck on there with an incredibly tenacious grip! I tried placing a block of wood against the hub and beating on it with a hammer. I tried applying heat. No luck.

Fortunately, Bob Patterson was scheduled to be coming by that day to leave us his "boat chipper-shredder" for removing the bottom paint, so Heather gave him a call to see if he had a prop-puller that he could bring along. Thankfully, he did, and when he and Barb arrived, we made quick work of getting the prop off of the shaft. Unfortunately, the whole process took the better part of half a day.

I knew that the next step was to get the shaft out of the coupling, and I knew that the coupler was heavily caked with rust, so I sprayed it with penetrating lubricant and planned to tackle the problem the next day.

Shaft Comes Loose--Eventually

The next morning I was able to separate the shaft coupler from the engine coupler, and also remove the two set screws which seat in dimles in the shaft and keep the shaft from driving forward or backing out of the coupler. The coupler, however, was seriously stuck, and exhibited no interest in releasing its grip on the shaft. I had expected this, however, and was prepared for the situation. I had a short length of aluminum rod which I planned to insert in the space between the couplings and use to drive the shaft out of the shaft coupling by reattaching the bolts which connect the shaft coupling to the engine coupling. I proceeded with this plan, and found that the coupler was not moving at all. Despite the fact that I was making progress tightening down the bolts. What gives? I backed the nuts off and examined the piece of aluminum rod that I had attempted to use as a jack. Bent! Grrrr.

Time for a trip to the hardware store to get a more substantial item to use for the jack! I picked up a couple of short 3/8 and 1/2 inch steel nipples, some additional bolts and nuts of various sizes and headed back to the boat. I started cranking on the bolts, and after about 20 minutes of grunting, swearing, and getting dizzy from hanging with my head down in the bilge, I actually managed to crank the bolts down to the point at which i needed to replace the bolts with shorter ones--the coupler had actually moved about 1/4 inch along the shaft!

At this point I removed the bolts and reached for the nipple, only to see it disappear into the bilge. Grrrrr. No problem, just grab one of the other nipples. Except the second 3/8 inch nipple was nowhere to be found and the 1/2 inch nipples didn't fit! Time to call it a day, I guess. I soaked the coupler/shaft joint with more penetrating grease and moved on to other projects.

When I did get the new nipple, I repeated the process outlined above (except I put a sheet below the shaft to catch anything that I dropped), and found that the coupler was moving much more easily than the day before. It still required the jack, but I actually felt like I was making progress. Insert jack, crank down on bolts, remove bolts, insert shorter bolts, crank down on bolts, remove bolts, insert shorter bolts. You get the idea. It took about 45 minutes, but eventually the coupler came off, and the shaft slid out the stern tube. Finally! And there was much rejoicing.

When in Doubt, Use Force

From there, I moved to the cutless bearing. Unfortunately, when the last bearing was installed, it was installed flush with the end of the stern tube, which left me with nothing to grab on to to help pull it out. I removed the set screw that was holding the bearing in place, and started investigating the situation. My first idea was to try to pound the bearing out from the other side, but the stern tube is actually built with a little lip on the inside which acts as a stop to keep the bearing from sliding too far into the tube, so there was not enough of the bearing showing past this lip to pound on. After a bit of head scratching, I figured the only way to get the thing out was to cut it out. After much cutting with a hacksaw blade held with Vice Grips, prying with a screwdriver, pounding with a nailset through the set screw holes, and a bit of cussing, I was able to get the bearing out. A bit mangled, but removed! Interestingly, it looked like someone at some point in the past had tried to remove the bearing and given up, as there was a small bent area where it looked like someone had started pounding a screwdrive between the bearing and the sterntube, but had given up...

At the point that I decided to try to pound the bearing out from inside the boat, I went aboard and removed the stuffing box. I figured that since I had the shaft out anyway, I might as well replace the hose on the box. I'm glad that I decided to do that, since I found that the O.D. of the stuffing box was larger than the O.D. of the stern tube. So someone had simply filled the void with polysulfide, and then cranked down on the hose clamps! When I loosened the hose clamps, the whole stuffing box arrangement practically fell off into the bilge! Yikes! Clearly something needed to be done on that front. After tossing around a few ideas, I decided to build up the O.D. of my stern tube with wraps of fiberglass. This was a relatively easy solution, as I only had to add about 1/8" total to the diameter. So I cut several strips of relatively lightweight cloth, wet everything out and wrapped the cloth around the sterntube, being careful to avoid creating any voids in the new layup. Easy fix, crisis averted.

Additionally, I found the stuffing box lock nut and packing nut to be completely seized. I was unable to make them budge! So, I spent 2 days soaking the stuffing box in penetrating grease. I guess soaking isn't quite the right word for it, since I didn't have enough to actually *soak* it, but I sprayed it with grease several times a day over those 2 days. Eventually, I was able to get the nut to back off, and I spent about an hour cleaning the packing/grease/corrosion/accumulated grime of the centuries out of the threads so that I will be able to reassemble the stupid thing and actually have it work the way it is supposed to.

This weekend I cleaned up the shaft and coupler as best as I could, reassembled the stuffing box, cut the cutless bearing to length and drilled a dimple for the set screw, and basically got everthing ready for reinstallation of the shaft, which I hope to do this week.

Problems, Problems Everywhere...

Update 6/5/2002: Ok, well, clearly, since I put the boat in the water 2 weeks ago, I *did* get the shaft reinstalled! I was concerned that putting the whole shaft arrangement back together was going to be difficult, based on how hard it was to take apart. I shouldn't have worried though. Everything slid back into place very easily. I greased up the end of the shaft, and was able to literally just slide the coupler back onto the end of the shaft with nothing more than a few taps with the palm of my hand. Amazing!

I pulled myself out of the bilge, feeling quite smug. I climbed down and reinstalled the prop, which was a little more difficult, as the key kept sliding up the shaft, however with a few taps with a hammer and nail set, I was able to persuade the key to stay in place. Two-thirds finished! Now I just needed to reconnect the shaft coupler to the transmission coupler and double check the alignment. I climbed back up onto the boat and stuck my head back down in the bilge.

As I slid the shaft forward to mate the two coupler halves, my smugness melted away. The shaft was about 1/4 inch too high and about 1/16 inch too far starboard! How could that be?! I was stunned. After I picked my jaw up out of the bilge, I headed inside to call my friend Tim for advice. He agreed to swing by and have a look, although he didn't seem too hopeful about the situation.

The next morning, Tim arrived and took a look. After some head scratching and shaft shoving we came to the conclusion that the engine must have been way out of alignment all along, however the sloppy installation of the stuffing box, detailed above, allowed enough play to at least mate the coupler halves. This probably explains why the cutless bearing was in such poor condition! To make matters worse, although the Yanmar flexible mounts are adjustable, they were already at the maximum height of their travel on the forward 2 mounts. Fortunately, the rear mounts still had substantial adjustment range left. Because of this, Tim and I determined that short of removing the engine and rebuilding the engine beds correctly, the best thing to do was to shim the front of the engine up. By doing so, I was certain that I would be able to get the alignment within acceptable tolerances. Obviously, the best solution involved removing the engine to rebuild those beds, but I had made the decision that *nothing* was going to postpone the launch date, and removing the engine would likely have pushed my launch somewhere into June. At this point, it is my intention to pull the engine in the fall and rebuild the engine beds and properly align the engine at that time. (Plus, this will give me an excuse to start the galley demolition/reconstruction.

I had a baby shower to attend that day, so I resolved to shim the engine before the sun went down on the following day.

Where Theres a Will...

The next day after work, I measured the distance between the two mounting bolts for the adjustable engine mounts, and cut and drilled two 3/8 inch thick white oak shims. Then I headed out to the boat to figure out how I was going to get the shims under the mounts. As it turned out, the whole procedure was not too difficult. I set up a short 2x4 block in front of the engine, which was tall enough to act as the fulcrum for a prybar lever. I slid the end of the prybar under the right-angle flange that attaches to the mounts. After removing the two mounting bolts, and backing off on the adjustment locknut on the top of the mount, I was able to hold the engine level with one hand while lowering the adjustment nut all the way to the bottom of the range of travel. I then, while still holding the engine up, used my free hand to lift the whole mount, and slide the shim into place. Piece o' cake!

I repeated the procedure on the other side, reinstalled (now longer) mounting bolts, and set about trying to get the shaft and engine aligned. Alignment is simple, but tedious and frustrating. I spent a couple of hours tightening, loosening, raising, lowering, sliding port, sliding starboard, tightening, loosening, sliding.... you get the picture. Eventually I was able to get the couplers to mate smoothly together, and the alignment appeared to be very close. I bolted everything together and called it a day. Success!

I didn't (and still don't, actually) own a set of feeler guages, so at that time I wasn't able to check the alignment properly. However, after being roundly chastised by a number of people for doing a somewhat shoddy job, I grabbed a piece of brass shim stock from work. I measured the stock as .008 inches with a micrometer, and headed home to see if I was even close. Well, I don't know how close I actually got it, but its within .008. That isn't necessarily within the suggested specs of "no more than .001 inch per inch of coupler diameter," but unfortunately, its as close as I can get it until the engine comes out, because there is no more room for port/starboard travel without drilling a new mounting hole for the rear mount. Which can only be done with the engine out of the boat. So, I will have to live with it for this season.