The new engine was waiting in storage for its turn, and when the schedule allowed, I was able to go to the boat to remove the old one and do some other small jobs. In the spring and early summer, it felt like a wave of illness was washing over us, and almost every week, the kid, my wife, or I was sick. This also meant that days at work dragged on, and the engine project seemed to progress painfully slowly.
The boat was in winter storage at the center of the full boat yard, so there was no hope of getting the old engine down and the new one up before the boats were launched. While waiting for that, I removed the engine and lifted it onto the galley floor. I came up with all sorts of fancy contraptions for this. In the end, I just put the two-by-four across the passageway and attached the chain hoist to it. The engine is light enough that it could be lifted that way. At least it worked well enough.
I used some pretty tough lifting slings I found at Biltema as lifting tackles. In hindsight, I could have used some old ropes or narrow lifting slings as even they have a 500kg load capacity, which is more than enough for this job. I found some of those at IKH for a few euros later. They had a pretty good length and they were strong enough. Plus, being narrower, they were more suitable for this purpose.
With the engine out of the way, I could remove the drive unit. After that, it was a good time to rip out the old soundproofing panels. It was high time to replace them. Before that, it was time to clean the engine compartment. For some reason, doing it was a bit of a struggle, even though it was a small job. The engine compartment ended up looking almost too clean! 🙂
When there was space, it was also a good time to think about the wiring. The walls of the toilet and the old wires had already been removed. Now I had more room to enlarge the old hole for the new wires. Luckily, I had an old rasp set for my drill from some other job. I used them to enlarge the hole to the right size.
The day when the boats were launched, meant moving sideways for us. And above all, having open space to get to the side with a truck crane. The following week I was able to get the engine out of the boat, which gave me a lot more space to work in the boat.
A little bit of painting in between…
I had a bad experiences from prior installments of new soundproofing panels. Cutting is a pain and the panels always end up being the wrong size… More and more glue keeps sticking to the carpet knife from the adhesive side of the panel until the job becomes nerve-wracking…
Fortunately, I found a remedy for this almost by accident: as a lesson once again, with proper tools, any job is easier. I had to learn by breaking the old ones first to get new ones. One evening, the blade of the old carpet knife broke, I continued with a regular knife, cut my finger, and put the tools away for the day.
While I had to stock up on thinner soundproofing panel somewhere, I bought a new, sturdier carpet knife. It was probably the best purchase this spring, it made the job so much easier. It’s really nice when the blade doesn’t get stuck and you can cut quickly and accurately. The job was no longer a drag. And when I put aluminum tape on the seams, it also looked nice. And since the boat’s hull is made of aluminum, the end result was quite shiny!
At some point, a friend and I brought the new engine from the storage to the shore. It went well in the end, even though it’s quite heavy to move with two people by hands. Especially with the weakened muscles from the pandemic. It feels like I only have half the strength I used to. Anyway, it ended up next to the boat.
Now that the engine was there, I could finally really examine it. It had been in storage for some time, but I couldn’t mess around with it there. When the engines were side by side, I noticed that certain parts were clearly in better condition on the old engine for some reason. So I ended up swapping some parts from the old to the new one, such as the rubber mount brackets, the idle screw, the starter panel, the drive unit valve, and some other things.
The new rubber mounts had been on their way for months and luckily they arrived just in time when the engine was still on the ground. I had bought new spare parts as a precaution, but the original parts seemed to be of better quality. I took the brackets to the engine side from the old one and adjusted them to the right place on our boat. It was a good thing that this job was done on the ground, as there was quite a bit of fiddling with jacking up the engine and opening the bolts. It definitely wouldn’t have worked without moving the engine inside the boat. Luckily, it wasn’t necessary.
The new drive unit was lifted into the boat. Or not quite! The unit had been waiting in the car for a while. As a last job of a beautiful evening, I decided to lift it into the boat. If someone had been there to help, it could have been pulled up more easily with a rope. It was so late in the evening that nobody was around. So I grabbed the drive unit box (about 35 kg, 41x82x48 cm) and started climbing the ladder backwards. I’m not so stupid that I wouldn’t have realized that the idea was a damn bad one. But it was even worse than I thought! 😀
After climbing a couple of steps, I realized that oh no, this is going to end up really badly. The box was so heavy compared to my own weight on the ladder that taking a step down would have meant either dropping the drive unit, landing on my chin, or both! So there was nothing to do but give it my all and continue. Sideways, I managed to get so high after what seemed like a long time that I could lift the box onto the side of the boat. At some point, the ladder was about to tip over. The Darwin Awards can wait, at least for a while. Knock knock.
To be continued in part 2.
-Jussi
