In Satan's evil Clutches

No, I can't be stopped. The puns just come to me, I am helpless to resist.
When we started looking for a boat we had two maybe hree requirements.
1. It had to be floating
2. It needed an running engine so we could bring it home
3. Pretty

The boat passed all three requirements.

Over the last year, we took the boat out several times and the only issue we really had beyond the overheating issue was the boat would creep forward in neutral. After some instigation it looks like the culprit is the shifter linkages are too loose to hold the shifter lever in the neutral zone. The lever is mounted in the cockpit and under normal conditions should point at about 9o'clock for neutral, 7 for forward and 11 for reverse. The weight of the lever however is enough to nudge the forward clutch pack and thus start to engage forward. On this transmission the knuckling over threshold is set towards the far end of the lever's travel (in both directions) so that there is little to no resistance from neutral to almost fully engaged forward or reverse. This means the that unless there is a positive stop or detent built into the shifter linkage assembly, there is nothing to really hold the transmission in neutral- thus creeping forward or backwards is a matter of the cockpit lever and linkages not balancing the transmission's shift lever at it's neutral position.

I've started adjusting the forward clutch pack tension gear to see if I can move the knuckling closer to the neutral zone, hopefully adding enough resistance to prevent a little lever slop/weight from engaging forward.

The transmission is as far I can tell a Paragon 1XE model- fully manual. The cover plate has been removed, the engine is to the right. The little bolt right in the middle of the image is the lockscrew that holds the screw collar in position like a collar around the threaded pressure plate (immediatly to its right).
The bolt is seated in one of many holes around the end face of the pressure plate)

To adjust:
Back the bolt out almost all of the way- it will clear the holes and still be able to sit in the screw collar (other wise it will most likely fall into the bottom of the transmission; a magnetic reacher tool helped me retrieve it and the lock washer when I dropped it)
Turn the collar clockwise (when viewing the engine from the flywheel) to tighten collar and thus increase the threshold force required to lock the transmission in forward. Line the lockscrew up with the desired hole and be sure it is seated properly and tighten. You will know if it's not in a hole if it doesn't tighten all the way back down as far as it was. It's probably best to adjust by just one or two increments at a time as there is a fine line between 'ok' and 'too tight' which could wear down the clutch discs prematurely.

Tip: Wiggle the transmission lever foreward/backward while trying to turn the screw collar. Since there is no neutral lock, this will help find the zone where there is no pressure on the forward or reverse clutch packs. Try this before sticking tools in there to pry and force the collar to spin. It should spin very freely when there is no pressure from the lever.

I have adjusted the forward setting and it seems to be working at least from the testing at the transmission lever. The weight/balance of the cockpit shift lever is still in need of adjusting and I'll have to wait to test the adjustment with the engine running to make sure it won't slip at higher RPMs.

I kicked Vin Diesel's butt!

Ok, thats a bit of an exaggeration.
Our Dickinson Newport diesel heater, which we named Vinnie, has been acting up, not burning well at all. As I had installed it according to the manufacturer's instructions, I knew it was probably suffering from operator error.

The poor burning characteristics, for those who may run into this issue, had much of the appearance of the low fuel and air scenario described in the Dickinson manual. The flame was low in the burner pot, dirty orange and quickly built up soot on the walls of the burner pot. It was not vaporizing or getting above the burner ring at any valve or fan setting. As there was a full tank of diesel, I knew it wasn't the issue. When we fist installed it, the #2 setting was sufficient to get flames to be full bodied and vibrant yellow, filling most of the lower half of the viewing window. Since the poor performance persisted across varying weather conditions, we figured winds/pressure weren't the issue. The fuel had been coming from the same gas station, which has a very high turn over so fuel quality should be consistant if nothing else.

We knew we needed Newport 911... er.. to do something different in our approach.

The only thing we hadn't done in the course of regular use and maintenance was to check and clean the metering valve outlet-to-burner pot pipe. So today I did that.
It was messy, but apparently exactly what was needed.

Base of the burner pot inlet (from valve outlet)
The soot from the burner pot just settles into the inlet pipe and after a few months of constant use had created a fairly thick goopy mess that slowly restricted the fuel flow. Even with regular cleaning of the burner pot sides and bottom enough loose soot makes its way into the inlet despite covering it as per Dickinson's directions. There was actually about 2-3 teaspoons of this sludge- ewww!
The end.

Do you remember the part in Dogma...

...where Jay is driving and the engine is revved pretty high, and Bethany leans up and asks, "What gear are you in?", and Jay says, "GEAR??!"

Well, that's what went through my head when I pulled the coolant header tank off the cylinder block to inspect the gasket and the thermostat.

Wait... there's no thermostat!

Please note the blue circle and arrow.. yes, there is something missing. :+)

Jeremy of Jeremy and Colleen fame had given me a spare thermostat he had laying about from his Perkins 4-108. How convenient! So, when I put the engine back together there will one less part to source. Hooray!

No thermostat, thats crazy. I should have checked sooner.

Bread Making

My friend Glenn turned me onto a book about making bread in 5 minutes. That's right, real bread in 5 earth minutes. There is a caveat though, it is technically 'making bread with about 5 min of preparation, and then baking it when you're ready'. Not that the authors are trying to get one by you, but they are presenting a very difference approach to making bread. The 'making' part really does take 5 minutes.

On the boat, there are a couple of considerations:

-space

-baking

-space

As for the space on a boat, one must be judicious, prudent, and judicious. Making the the bread means storing the dough if you're not going to bake with it right away. Thats fine. I portioned (proportioned?) the recipe to give me 1 quart of risen dough which then neatly fits in a container in our fridge until needed by our tummies.

The proceedure is wicked simple, which means its fast and easy to contain. Containing messes on the boat is key. The less mess, the less, cleanup. The flour, water, yeast and salt is added all at once to into the plastic container (no mixing bowl = less cleanup), stirred for about 30 seconds with a spatula and then left to sit and rise. Thats its. in about 3-4 hours its risen and ready bake. mmm

We like to make pizzas with the dough, see our earlier pizza pie post, or naan. We now have a little convection toast oven (AC) and have been using it to bake pizzas lately. It works pretty good, and we always have the wok/cast iron option to fall back on if we're on the hook or, on the lamb.

I've also experimented with baking on Vin (the Dickonson diesel heater), but haven't gotten that down yet.

Leaking like a sieve...

Why would you say "leaking like a sieve"? Leaking implies a malfunction or failure to perform properly- a sieve is designed to let matter pass through it, not stop it. So to say something is leaking like a sieve would indicate that a sieve by its very nature is broken. Would you buy a sieve that was broken? or one that didn't 'leak'? Perhaps we need a new idiom.

I said all of that to say this. Our engine was leaking like a sieve.

The last 3 times we took the boat out, the antepenultimate, penultimate, and ultimate time, it was a pint low on oil when I did the prelaunch sequence engine checks. It seemed odd. Normally Satan is a cup or so low every 10 hours or so. I checked all the usual suspects, oil filter lines, oil cooler connections, retightened the timing cover bolts... strange. It was the end of the season and we were going to be putting Satan to bed for the winter so I wasn't too worried. It would get us across the river to our present home.. and then it could sit and think about what it had done.

Well, really I sat and thought about what it had done. Westerbekes (enter mindless banter about how westerbeke 4-107's are really perkins 107 blocks with shiny red accessories and wetliners) are not known for being unleaky with regards to oil. I thought about it some, thought maybe the oil sump gasket was bad, maybe the new valve cover gasket I put in was bad, or ... maybe the rear main seal. Then I stopped thinking about it.

Months pass, time to get Satan ready for school. I was doing some research on inspecting/refitting the cold starting aid. Last year we had a bear of a time getting Satan running in the early April and at the time didn't know whether or not it was fitted with or had a working cold starting aid. A cold starting aid is an electric element in the air intake that when energized heats up, allows a minuscule amount of diesel fuel through and burns it- essentially letting hot diesel oil/flames into the air mix to give the cylinders something yummy to chew on as they fire up.

So I was poking around Satan, looking to see if the air intake manifold was fitted witha cold starting aid, or... a fitting to allow raw ether injection as many Perkins do. Well, it has a cold starting aid, it was connected and ... oh. the air intake cap's hose connection to the valve cover was not connected to the valve cover... Well, that explains why there was oil, oil everywhere! It must have been after I replaced the valve cover gasket- I must have not secured the hose and it worked itself loose. Sheesh! Well, now I know! That explains all the oil in the bilge, and all over the engine block.

I'm excited that there is a cold starting aid.

Why is there a hose there anyway? does it feed oil into the system from the air intake side for lubrication? It seems its set up to allow splashed/aerated lube oil that runs over the valves to waft its way into air intake and then into the combustion chambers.