maintenance – Riveted

Airship at Dusk

Laura Domela — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 13:26:00 +0000

We took the dinghy out for a little more Torqueedo testing as the sun was setting last night in Port Gamble Bay. I have to say, I do prefer the ride when we're going full speed (which tonight was about 4.2 kts). The dinghy rides so much flatter on the surface with this lightweight outboard…it's great! I really don't think "gunning it" is in the spirit of Torqueedo ownership though, which is why we'll likely get a backup battery. Good news about the batteries: they take very little time to charge.

Oh and this: it seems our Wallas diesel furnace quit working late yesterday afternoon. This puts a bit of a cramp in our boating plans for the next couple days…booo. We went through all the troubleshooting steps in the manual and got to "glow plug error" which is the thing that lights the little bit of fuel as it comes to the heater so it can make heat (and the fix is "Take heater in for service.") So as long as the generator is running, we can have heat. But if we want quiet — no heat.

I Fixed It!

Laura Domela — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 22:16:33 +0000

Yeah I know, I'm the one who broke it in the first place, but I fixed it!

The other day in La Conner while approaching the fuel dock, I set myself up poorly. Not familiar with (or prepared for) the intricacies of the current in Swinomish Channel, I left our moorage at the marina and headed over to get fuel prior to heading the rest of the way to Seattle. I started to dock with the current (wrong) and was fumbling while trying to regroup and spin around to dock against the current (recommended) and I did the thing…the thing I never thought I'd ever do: I broke/sheared the shear pin in the stern thruster. Well crap. Somehow I must have flipped directions too fast and so there ya go. No more stern thruster. Good things: (1) I don't normally use the thrusters when docking, and (2) A lot of boats don't even have stern thrusters. Bad thing: I was going to have to fix it. Booo. (The bow and stern thrusters on Airship are through-hull, and they allow you to move the bow and stern sideways, for maneuvering in tight spaces.)

Once we were in Seattle tucked in at Bell Harbor, we did a little investigating. The stern thruster is in the hull, back behind the drive shaft and PSS seal (remember those things?) and the access is from a hatch inside the back cupboard, underneath the microwave. Before removing the microwave, I stuck my head down the foremost hatch and with the flashlight, ascertained what model of thruster we had: Side Power SE40/125. Also, right on the thruster itself there was a label that said:

That what I thought I remembered from poking around down there when we first bought the boat. Sweet! So out came the microwave, some bowls, the alcohol, and out came the tools.

Looking into the hatch after I'd removed the thruster motor (it's heavy):

This might give you a feel for the workspace:

Unfortunately but not surprisingly, we found that the previous owners of the boat (*cough cough* the dealer) had at some point used the spare and never replaced it. Awwww, fail! This is where it's supposed to be:

Broken shear pin. No spare.

So we started calling around. Fisheries Supply: special order only. Fisheries gave us a list of places to try and we started calling down the list: nope, nope, nope, nope. Our friend Sam (who was working the boat show) went up to the Side Power booth to see if they had any. They did not, but they suggested we call CSR Marine over at Shilshole Marina. We called them, and woohoo! They had one, and said for $20 it could be ours. (Shear pins are normally about 4 bucks, and CSR Marine did not usually sell to the public, but whatever, it would mean we could fix the thruster and put the salon back together today.)

New shear pin, installed:

Me, re-installing the thruster motor and the reconnecting the power to it:

Ta Da!!

(I wasn't going to buy a spare for $20, but we've got one ordered and we'll be sure to put it where it belongs for, um, next time?)

Another Mesmerizing Maintenance Mystery!

Laura Domela — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 00:57:23 +0000

The other day, our macerator pump stopped macerating. (This is the thing that empties your waste tank.) If you can't empty your waste tank, you'll soon no longer have a working head (toilet). This is not a good situation to be in, obviously.

I wish we could say that the first thing we checked was the ground wire on the electrical panel and that it was loose and we tightened it and everything started working as it should…

But it didn't happen that way.

It started innocently enough. We could hear the pump running, as always, but this time the tank level wasn't going down. We thought maybe it just needed a little longer, so we ran it for 15 minutes or so and still no joy. Since it was running but not pumping anything, our guess was that it was not getting primed. Usually, this happens because one of the one-way duck valves leading into or out of the pump is clogged.

Oh yay!

So Kevin climbed down into the lazarette (involving an intense set of yoga moves) to get into a position where he could begin to remove the raw sewage hoses from both ends of the macerator pump. Some serious contortionism is required to get into this position in the first place…add the need to use tools and avoid spilling raw sewage, and you've got yourself some drama right there!

Kevin removed both duck valves, carried them topside, cleaned them completely and made sure they were working correctly. Oddly, they looked just fine. He then reinstalled the valves, hooked the raw sewage hoses back to the pump, flipped the switch to try it again.

Nothing.

Now the pump wouldn't even run. He figured he must have accidentally unplugged an electrical connection or something, so back down into the lazarette he went. He checked all the electrical connections, and then checked that power was being applied to the pump when it was turned on. Power, check! The volt meter said 14.2 volts…because we were under way. (Did we mention we were under way when all this was happening? Oh sorry, forgot that part.) So 14 volts is being applied to the motor but the motor is not running. Bad sign.

Next theory: Maybe we overheated the motor while running it for 15 minutes and it's got a thermal cutoff. Usually if a motor has a thermal cutoff, it resets itself automatically after it cools down. So we waited for half an hour. The motor is now cold. We try again.

Nothing.

Maybe we burned the motor up? Kevin read in some online boating forums that sometimes these motors can be fixed by cleaning the brushes, so Kevin went back down into the lazarette, removed the pump, then removed the motor from the pump to see if the motor itself worked when power was applied directly to it.

Nope.

Okay, time to get serious. Next, he disassembled the entire pump and motor assembly, cleaned the commutator and brushes (see first photo, above), and oddly, everything looked fine. He reassembled the whole thing, and tried it again.

Nothing.

Looks like we must have ourselves a dead macerator pump. Once we arrived in Prince Rupert, we headed over to Sea-Sport Outboard Marina Service & Clothing, picked up a different kind of macerator pump (a Jabsco Self-Priming pump, because they didn't have our brand, a Whale Marine "Gulper"), then walked a few more blocks up to Saanich Heating & Plumbing to get a bunch of clamps and adaptors so we could plumb the new, different pump into the place of our existing pump, and returned to Airship to start the Pump Replacement Project.

Step 1: Attach the correct connector to the wires on the new pump.
Step 2: Plug it in.
Step 3: Flip the switch.

Nothing. Wait, what???

Step 4: Unplug it and check voltage at the connector. Yep, 12.8 volts.
Step 5: Plug it back in.

Nothing. Could the brand new pump be bad??

On a whim, we tried plugging the new pump into a completely different circuit (the one for the raw water washdown). We flipped the switch and the pump started right up.

At this point it gets really weird, because remember, our pump was running (just not pumping) before.

Just for kicks, we plugged the old pump into the new circuit, and guess what? The old pump worked fine too! Could we miraculously have developed a wiring problem, right when our pump was having a mechanical issue?

We checked the voltage on the circuit when the pump was plugged in and the voltage showed almost zero. What this means in electrical terms is that the circuit is not completely broken, but somewhere in the wiring between the battery and the pump, something has high resistance. The most likely suspect would be one of those little in-line fuses, which could of course be hidden anywhere in the wiring of the boat. Kevin meticulously followed the wire from the batteries through the electrical panel, behind and underneath access panels, through the engine compartment, up to the switch that turns the macerator on and off. Then, he followed the wire all the way from there (through the entire boat) back to the lazarette.

Nothing.

He followed the positive wire everywhere he could find to follow it (checking the resistance with a multimeter), and it all looked fine. (He checked the positive wire because that's where any fuse, switch, or other thing that might have failed if the circuit overheated would be located.)

That only left two choices. Either he'd missed something in following the journey of the power wire through the entire boat, or…is there any way it could possibly be the ground wire??

Having something wrong with the ground wire is super unlikely, because it just runs from each device (the pump, in this case) straight to a big metal bar inside the electrical panel where all the ground wires from the entire boat are connected together.

Just on the "maybe we'll win the lottery" off-chance, he plugged the power wire from the pump, together with the ground wire from another circuit. The pump started right up.

Unbelievable.

That only left one thing to check. We opened up the DC electrical panel, found the big metal bar with about 52 wires running to it from every circuit on the boat, looked through all of them until we found that one that was labeled "macerator pump" and guess what?

The screw was loose.

We turned the screw half a turn to tighten it, went out and plugged everything back together, and the (old) pump worked perfectly. Not just perfectly, it ran about 4x faster than we'd ever heard it run before. So apparently, this screw had been loose for a long time and our pump was always just barely running. (Because of the loose screw, the voltage would be lower, so the pump wouldn't be getting as much power, or if things jiggled wrong, it would have no power at all. On a boat, things jiggle!)

Now, two days later, after several more yoga sessions in the lazarette, a bunch more grunting with hose clamps and raw sewage lines, wiring, zip ties, and crimped connectors, everything is back together and working better than ever.

At least this mystery was a solvable one!

An Update and a Mystery

Laura Domela — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:47:37 +0000

Airship Goes to Alaska

Alrighty gang, here's an update on our mechanical issues. I don't even think there will be pretty pictures this time, so if boat mechanical issues are not your thing, feel free to skip this post.

As you may remember, we had a little excitement at sea last week. Our dripless shaft seal overheated while running at higher cruise speeds for an extended time. (Here's what a dripless shaft seal is and does.) We smelled a burning smell and the boat shuddered and slowed down. We put the boat in neutral (in 5 foot seas) and found the smell coming from the shaft seal. We tried carefully putting the boat in reverse, seemed okay, then forward, seemed okay, so we kept making slow idle progress forward as we inspected things. The seal was hot but cooled down quickly as we continued at a lower rpm. We proceeded on to Juneau (three more hours), checking the seal continuously for any signs of heat.

Once in Juneau we hauled the boat out to inspect the shaft and prop to make sure there was nothing wrapped or any damage. Surprisingly, everything seemed perfect. There was nothing wrong, and no sign that there ever had been anything wrong. The surface of the prop shaft had the usual greenish patina/moss. (If something gets wrapped around the shaft (fishing line, for instance), it polishes the shaft to a nice shiny stainless steel gleam.) The prop and shaft turned easily and there was no play in the shaft when lifting it or pushing it side to side.

Since everything on the outside of the boat seemed normal, we turned our attention to the inside of the boat. We'd been suspecting for a while that we might have a problem with shaft alignment (some vibration we didn't think was normal, loose bolts on the shaft coupler…things like that). We had a local shipwright check our alignment and it was definitely off. He aligned it for us and we got to learn all about how the engine mounts are adjusted to move the engine and transmission into alignment with the shaft, and how to check the alignment ourselves in the future. Neat!

We were still a little worried though, because although things seemed okay, we hadn't found the "smoking gun" that had caused our problem out in Lynn Canal. The best guess at the time was that it might have been a weird combination of three things: (1) the slightly misaligned shaft causing more vibration and friction than normal, (2) running the engine at high rpm for several hours on end, exacerbating problem (1) above, and (3) cavitation caused by the following seas we were running in when the overheating happened, keeping sea water away from the bearing parts it was supposed to be cooling. (Spoiler: turns out this was completely wrong.)

So, we took the boat out for a sea trial to see if things were okay now. In our extended testing at all different rpms while watching the listening (and smelling) the shaft, shaft seal, etc., everything stayed cool and nothing seemed off – until we tried the high rpm test again. At 65% power (3200rpm), the shaft seal bellows inflated like this:

This is really, really bad because if that bellows ruptured, sea water would be entering the boat quickly. This can cause boats to…you know…sink and stuff.

So, if at this high rpm this is what the bellows was doing, then for 3+ hours running in Lynn Canal the other day, the inflated bellows could have been putting undue pressure on the shaft seal (the carbon collar part that presses and rotates against the stainless steel collar plate) and causing the seal to overheat. The shuddering slow down we felt therefore might have been the shaft seal dragging at high temperatures.

After talking to PYI (the company that makes the shaft seal), it sounded like the raw water pressure from the engine was too high for the shaft seal. The seal was supposed to have 1-2psi for normal operation, and no more than 10psi. At high RPMs, the raw water pressure could be over 20psi. Normally though, the pressure would not build up that high because the water would be able to flow easily through the cutless bearings out into the sea.

Here's what a Cutless bearing looks like. The shaft goes through the bearing, and the grooves allow the flow of cooling and lubricating water to the shaft:

We installed a valve in the raw water feed line so we could reduce the flow of water to the seal.

This worked…the seal ran cool and the bellows didn't inflate. But now the seal leaked quite a bit. We later learned while troubleshooting the leak (and looking at survey photos of the shaft seal from when we purchased the boat), that the inflation incident had pushed the rear of the bellows a little over an inch aft on the fiberglass tube, so the bellows was no longer properly compressed.

We readjusted the shaft seal per factory installation instructions and…no more leak. (Note the two dots on the stern tube on the right…those are set screws for the forward Cutless bearing. In the inflated photo, the bellows is pressed all the way up against those set screws. This is how it should look…well, almost…ours now has a larger gap between two folds of the bellows due to the prolonged inflation):

We sea tested with this new shaft seal adjustment for several hours. The seal ran cool and smooth and the bellows did not inflate, but we had to turn the water flow down to just a trickle to stop the bellows from inflating at higher RPMs. This meant we still had a problem…not enough water flowing through the Cutless bearings.

When we disconnected the cooling water feed line from the shaft seal, we noticed that only a tiny amount of water was leaking back into the boat through the Cutless bearings (there should have been a pretty good flow), so we decided to have the boat hauled out (again) to see if we could manually clear the Cutless bearing grooves.

Once hauled out, we removed the prop and found that the grooves on the outside Cutless would only allow us to poke a stainless steel rod in about an inch and a half before they ran into some kind of gritty crud.

We then disassembled the shaft seal inside, and when we removed the bellows, a large chunk of something black fell into the bilge. The same black something was melted and burned around the outside of the inner Cutless bearing. Small pieces were wedged into the grooves, and much larger chunks were still rattling around inside the bellows.

We dug all the pieces out, and it looks like they used to form some sort of a hard black plastic or rubber seal or collar, about the same inner diameter of the shaft. (You know that part in CSI where they bring all the pieces out and puzzle them together on a giant table to try to figure out what they used to be? That's what we did, but without giant light table or slick soundtrack.)

The pieces are consistent and have a specific complex design, and the pieces match up with each other. (And they all smell exactly like the burning smell we smelled during the event the other day.) There's a lip, and some grooves. Here are some close ups:

All the parts of the shaft seal looked fine and were present and accounted for, so nothing in the shaft seal gave us a clue to what this mystery object was or where it came from. These (quite large) pieces were INSIDE the bellows, and there's simply no way anything this size could get in there from anywhere else. It had to be in there when the shaft seal was installed. (That's right, it's coming from INSIDE the house!!)

Thanks to some super expert sleuthing, we now believe that this extra part was in fact a lip seal from another kind of shaft seal. Yep, that's right. A part from a completely different kind of shaft seal, was inside our shaft seal.

This mystery part apparently caused our whole shebang. But the plot thickens. This is the original factory-installed shaft seal. Our boat is two years old and has only about 1000 hours on it, and we've been told that this shaft seal has never been removed since the boat was new. So, the source of the foreign part remains a mystery. Was it like when a surgeon accidentally leaves a tool inside the patient, and they find it years later during a simple x-ray for abdominal pain? We may never know.

We've now pulled both Cutless bearings (without having to remove the shaft or the rudder, hooray!) and both of them are completely destroyed. (Normally, these last for years and years and thousands of hours. You should inspect yours periodically though when you haul your boat out. Here is why:

Here's the inside of a new one:

And here are the two we just pulled out of the boat:

We were only able to find one new Cutless bearing locally, but the Nordic Tug factory had some in manufacturing stock that they could sell us and ship to us right away (as well as a new PSS shaft seal), and we should have those parts by Friday (just in time for the Golden North Salmon Derby here in Juneau, when everyone will be out fishing, not working on our boat). So probably on Monday, we'll replace both Cutless bearings, install the new PSS shaft seal, do some double and triple checking of all the connections, bolts, adjustments, and alignments, and then do a lot more sea testing around here to make sure we're all good before heading south.

This brings up an important point for those of you who own things like boats and RVs (or would like to):

A boat is NOT a car.

Unlike the cars we all drive, boats are not built in multi-billion dollar factories by precision robots. They are not the product of hundreds or thousands of man-years of engineering, development, and testing. They are not sold in enormous quantities for worldwide distribution and supported by thousands of expert-in-one-brand technicians.

Each boat (or RV) is a work of art — individually and lovingly hand-crafted by living, breathing, hard-working, fallible human beings. Every boat made has flaws, mistakes, compromises, and other issues that we would never expect to find in mass-produced products like our cars.

You cannot expect to hop in your boat, turn the key, and buzz around the waterways without a care in the world, stopping at the Jiffy-Lube a couple of times a year for ten minutes of minimal routine maintenance. A boat requires care and understanding. Each boat has its own individual personality with its good and bad traits.

If you’re going to have a long and happy relationship with your boat or RV, you need to really get to know its quirks and traits. You need to look deep into its eyes, take long walks together on the beach, and have intimate conversations about life, the universe, and Cutless bearings. You need to understand how the various systems work and interact and fail because yours WILL break down sometimes, and those breakdowns will almost never be simple “drop it off at the shop and pick it up the next day with the franistan replaced” kinds of events. You will be out there at sea or in a remote boondocking location – far from the nearest factory-authorized repair station, and your family's safety may depend on the quality of your relationship with your wonderful machine.