June 10 | Maintenance Day

On Sunday I headed down to the boat around 1045. I brought the boat in to the dock for a substantial washdown, while Heather and Gavin played on the dock. Around noon, Heather headed off to gather some lunch and pick up her friend Irackley who was passing through town. While she was running errands, Gavin and I took the boat back to the mooring and repaired the cracked fuel fill neck with JB Weld.

With the repair work finished, Gavin and I joined Heather and Irackley on the club deck for lunch. We got a call from our friend Phoebe, who was also passing through town on her way back to Boston so she diverted to the club and we all spent a nice—if a bit hot and still—afternoon relaxing aboard before our friends had to depart.

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.

When we were having the survey done, our surveyor found that the fuel fill neck had previously been broken loose and at some time in the past had been epoxied back into place. The epoxy bond was poorly executed, and had deteriorated to the point that when our surveyor was inspecting it, the fuel fill neck came loose in his hand. Oops!

Initial Plans Fall Through

After we purchased the boat, and before trucking it from Rockport, Maine to Gorham we pumped all of the fuel out of the tank. I planned to try to have the tank welded over the winter, so I was going to need to remove the fuel anyway, and I really didn't want to risk having diesel spilled all through the bilge.

When we purchased her, the boat had only 3 proper seacocks installed: one for the head intake, one for the head overboard discharge, and one in the hanging locker which is not attached to anything(!) presumably put in place in anticipation of adding a sink to the hanging locker area.

Although we haven't decided yet if we want to remove that seacock and through-hull in the hanging locker, we are postive that we will be adding seacocks to the other four through-hulls that are below the waterline. Three of these through-hulls are simply fiberglass tubes with aging hose attached with rusting clamps. The fourth is for the raw water intake for the diesel. That through-hull at least had an inline ball valve attached to the seawater intake strainer. Still inadequate, but a step up from the cockpit and galley sink drains.