T&T: General Lehman 135 work

[Keith]

Well, I was down in the engine room all day, since it was rainy and cold 
outside, and I need to get off my b-tt and do the maintenance. I had flushed 
the engine FW cooling system, and replaced the temperature sending unit. I 
also pulled the expansion tank and replaced the thermostat. The old one 
looked new... I've had the boat going on 7 years and have no idea when it 
was last changed. The only tricky thing about the expansion tank is that you 
can't remove the vent line (braided metal line on the Port side) by 
unscrewing it from the expansion tank. You have to undo the compression 
fitting on the engine side. Other than that, it's just a couple of bolts 
holding the tank onto studs coming out of the engine, and unplug a couple of 
electrical connections. Both of these tasks went well.

I also pulled the exhaust elbow for inspection. This is one of the new SS 
versions that American Diesel sells. I put it on four years ago and it was 
darned near as clean as the day I put it on. No blockage whatsoever in 
either the exhaust or water side. One slight problem though. I had the FW 
cooling side of the engine drained, via the little petcock on the Port side 
of the block. When I started pulling the elbow off, I noticed a little 
trickle of water coming out. I drained the raw water side by removing the 
end cap on the main heat exchanger. This was lower than the level of the 
elbow, but when I pulled the elbow free, water was shooting out of a hole on 
the engine flange that was right below the exhaust exit hole. I got some of 
this back in the exhaust. Don't know how much, but it was a fair stream 
coming out for a bit, maybe a couple of quarts or less. I dried out the 
exhaust ports with paper towels, put everything back together and cranked a 
little at a time while holding the stop button. No apparent problems, so 
went ahead and started up. Everything ran fine; ran her up to temp to dry 
out those passages. That hole is blinded off by the new exhaust elbow 
flange, e.g., there is no place for that water to go. I assume it was salt 
water, but I didn't have time to taste it while trying to keep it out of the 
engine. I guess there is someplace else I should drain the water from the 
engine before doing this again, although that's probably going to be another 
four years. It didn't do this to me the first time I changed the elbow, so I 
must have overlooked something.

Oh yea, I check the torque on the four bolts that hold the shaft flange to 
the transmission flange. While snug, they weren't exactly tight, so I 
tightened them again, this time with blue threadlocker as well as the lock 
washers that were already there. I wonder about this... maybe a very slight 
alignment problem is stretching the bolts a bit?

Oh well, that's all for today! Whew... now it's time for a rum and coke.


Keith
_____
"I'm not a real movie star. I still have the same wife I started out with 
twenty eight years ago". - Will Rogers