Psycho Heater and Stubborn Outboard

Almost sounds like a couple super villains that Superman should be dealing with, but in fact are a couple things we did battle with today.  The day started with me finishing the wax of the hardtop (a task we put off so we could escape Virginia). When I came back inside, I noticed the heater was acting a bit strange. Just as I came in, the air conditioner kicked on (one of the nice perks of this marina...electricity is included). I glanced down and noticed the thermostat said it was 83 degrees. Then it said 84, 85, 86, 87, and 88 as if it were practicing counting with Big Bird from Sesame Street. I guess it was happy with 88 so then it started counting backwards until it reached 75 and the AC unit shut down (the thermostat was set at 76).  A couple minutes later the unit fired back up and I looked over and it was claiming 82 this time.  The whole time I doubt it was over 75 inside.

The thermostat has been acting a bit flaky lately, but this is by far the wildest swing we had noted.  I checked the temperature at the thermal sensor at the base of the thermostat and the non-contact thermometer claimed it was 72 (and I know it reads 2 degrees low).  I turn the unit off, wait a few minutes, and turn it back on. It claims 83 again and this time it just stays at 83 for a while. I start thinking that the thermostat is going bad and do a little research on the cost of a replacement on the internet while it starts practicing counting forward and backward between 75 and 90. Big Bird would be proud.

The psychotic air conditioning
controller

The thermostat/controller I come to find runs about $200 online.  Ouch.  I decide to try unplugging the controller wire and plugging it back in.  No change.  I decide it is time to clean the filter and unit anyway (it is amazing how fast dog hair collects there when you have two aboard) and just take a look at the whole unit even though I doubt it will change anything.  I get the shop vac out and vacuum up the dog hair and then clean and rinse the reusable filter.  For no real reason I decide to look at the control circuit panel.  I open up the box and don't notice any burnt trace wires.  I decide to unplug the control wire and plug it back in again. I put every thing back together and turn the unit back on.

To my utter surprise, the thermostat reads 75 degrees.  Huh.  I change the temperature setting to 73.  The unit turns on and blows cold air and the thermostat slowly goes down to 72 and then the unit turns off.  It continues acting perfectly normal through another cycle.  I change the temperature to 75 and continue to monitor it for the rest of the day.  It seems to be acting perfectly normal now.  Cool! (no pum intended)  My best guess is that, contrary to what one might think, the controller doesn't read the temperature and just tell the unit when to turn on and off, but the controller board on the air conditioning unit does this.  The act of re-seating the plug on the controller probably knocked some corrosion off and now everything works. Keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

The other task was one I had planned for today.  I've continued having some issues with getting my dinghy motor to idle well.  A while back in Brunswick I even had a shop work on it and it seemed good for a short while, but soon it would be back to dying when at idle.  A couple days ago I hooked up a garden hose to an outboard fresh water flushing adapter so I could run the engine while mounted on the rail of the boat (this supplies cooling water to the motor when it is not sitting in the water).  I fired the thing up and played with it for a little bit. It would run for a while, then suddenly sputter and die.  I'd start it back up and it would run for a while, then suddenly sputter and die.  The engine seems to run fine when not at low speed.

Stock photo of the
model from Yamaha

One thing I did notice is that when the motor sputters, it tends to smoke a lot. Since I didn't have any history on the motor (it came with the boat) and it looked pretty new inside, I wasn't sure if the break-in was complete. So, to be safe, I did add more oil to the gasoline (this is a 2-stroke) than is normal. I don't know if this is contributing to the issue or not, but I will likely return to a normal mix next fill up.  In the meantime, I decided to try readjusting the idle mixture. With the engine off, I gently tightened the idle mixture screw until it bottomed out, recording the number of turns (so I knew were it was set and could reset it there if needed).  I then turned the screw out to where it was and then just a little bit more so it would be set a little rich.  I started the motor and let it run a bit and it idled OK at that setting.  I then slowly tightened (closed) the idle screw, allowing the engine to stabilize about each 1/4 of a turn. Once it started stumbling, I turned it back 1/4 turn until it was idling OK again. I let it run for a bit and it seemed happy.

This was all done with the engine mounted on the rail, so all that was left was to take the dingy for a spin and see if it would run OK.  While this was work, it was also fun. We dropped the dinghy into the water and mounted the motor on it.  We started off with a low speed cruise around the marina (so I was never all that far from the boat or the tools).  The motor shifted into and out of gear at idle speed, didn't stall, and seemed generally happy. Next I dropped my wife back off at the boat (so I would have someone to call in case I got stranded somewhere and needed a ride back) and took it out on the ICW for some higher speed runs.

I started with a couple of short high speed runs (not beyond what I was willing to row back from) and everything seemed good to go. When the engine was brought back to idle, it would continue to run just fine. I increased the length of the runs as I gained confidence in the operation.  My longest run was about a mile and the whole time the engine performed well.  When I got back to the marina, I found some dolphins jumping and playing in the basin, so (after watching them a bit) I decided to let them be and did a little more touring of the area with the dinghy.  Man this boat can fly with a single person on board.  That 15 hp motor brings the RIB up on plane and zips right along.  I turned into one of the canals and looked at some of the homes that have easy access to the ICW.

I eventually made my way back to the boat, and the outboard ran perfectly the whole time.  We pulled the motor off the dinghy, placed it back on the rail, and put the boat back on the davits.  I then hooked up the hose and did a fresh water flush of the motor.  In order to clean the salt water out of the cooling passages and drain the carburetor at the same time, I do this run of the engine without the gas tank connected.  The engine can run for a couple of minutes (depending on how fast you run it) without the gas tank attached by draining the gas sitting in the carburetor bowl.  I've found this is just about the right amount of gas to give the cooling system a good flush.

We are getting things ticked off the list in preparation to leave the marina and spend a bit more time on the hook. With any luck, we will be continuing our journey soon.

Highs and Lows

I don't know where I heard it, perhaps on a number of blogs I read, but the general idea is that cruising is filled with highs and lows that are a bit more extreme than those in a more "normal" lifestyle.  I think my lack of posts recently was due to one of those lows.

After arriving in Brunswick, I had a list of items in need of attention. This seems to be a common theme aboard boats...what do they say...something like "if you don't have something to fix on your boat, you aren't looking hard enough".  There were lines to replace, electrical issues to troubleshoot, and other minor repairs on top of the items that were never completed by the boatyard.

One of the items on my list was a fiberglass repair.  While en-route I noticed a crack where it appeared the interior and exterior fiberglass skin of the hollow arch on the back of the boat was separating and no longer a single part.  After posing the question to the Leopard owners group I found this is fairly common and the repair isn't particularly difficult.  The repair consists of cutting the crack to make a wider gap and then filling the gap with a thickened epoxy (making a better bond than the original fiberglass resin). I found a pre-thickened epoxy at West Marine as well as syringes and this part of the repair went fairly well.  I injected the epoxy into the crack with a syringe and then sealed it up with cellophane tape as I went to keep the epoxy in place as it cured.

Crack cut open for repair.

Of course, after the epoxy had cured, I needed to refinish the edge of the arch.  I had some color matched gel coat from a couple repairs back when I was in Palm Coast. The color matched stuff wasn't quite the right color since the sun had bleached the gel coat and the panel we could remove for the color match was in a more shaded location.  So, to get a better match, I added some white gel coat and came up with a pretty good color match.  While doing the color matching, I discovered the plastic cup I was using to mix the gel coat are a poor choice and the gel coat started to dissolve the cup and dribble onto the deck of the boat.  I quickly poured my remaining mix into a paper cup to preserve my work and then cleaned up the gel coat that had spilled out of the cup.  Fortunately, this was before I had added the hardener, so cleaning up the dribbled gel coat wasn't too big of a deal.

In order to spray on the gel coat, I should put up some plastic so I wouldn't accidentally spray neighboring boats.  Being a good neighbor, I constructed a plastic tent around the area where I would be working.  I added the hardener to the mix and a little acetone to thin it all for spraying.  About the time I was finishing up the application, in my usual luck, the wind started picking up and shifting direction.  The wind managed to rip one corner of my tent loose and it, naturally, made a beeline for my wet gel coat.  The flapping corner managed to slap the wet gel coat and then apply it to other areas I hadn't intended.  Cue the next scene from Laurel and Hardy.

After re-securing the tent corner I quickly grabbed a rag with some acetone to remove the unintended gel coat application.  While cleaning up, the tent came loose again and while fighting with it, I dropped my rag full of acetone...right onto the name we applied to the boat during the renaming ceremony.  In addition to cleaning and thinning gel coat, acetone apparently does a really good job of removing the color from vinyl lettering. As a result, our 10 month old lettering was now ruined. I finished cleaning up the errant gel coat and the smear of color from the lettering that made its way across the adjacent surfaces. I tried applying a bit more gel coat, using a brush, to the area that was thinned in the plastic tent attack, but brushing on gel coat doesn't produce a nice even coat.  I gave up, removed the tent, and allowed the gel coat to cure.  Not a very good start to my first gel coating attempt.

After a couple of hours, I noticed that the gel coat wasn't curing particularly well.  By this point it was getting cold and dark, so I thought maybe the cold and damp air was inhibiting its progress and it would cure overnight.  But somehow, given the way the day had gone thus far, I had a feeling that may not work.  So, that evening I researched how to deal with gel coat curing problems.

If you are unfamiliar with gel coat, it is a rather strange substance to use for a coating as it can only fully cure when air is absent...not a great characteristic when using it here on planet earth (unless you are applying it to the inside of a mold that will be covered with something else).  To combat this, they make a version of gel coat with a "wax".  As the gel coat starts setting up, the wax works itself to the surface and provides the needed barrier to the air so the stuff will properly cure.  At least that is the theory.

I don't know if it was the fact my gel coat was about 8 months old, or if I failed to mix it properly (after shaking the can for about a half hour), but it seems that the "wax" wasn't doing its job in my application and the gel coat was still not cured by the next morning.  To try and salvage my already somewhat messed up gel coat, I ran around town looking for a chemical called poly vinyl alcohol (PVA or mold release).  This stuff, when sprayed on gel coat, acts like the wax is supposed to act by blocking the air.  I applied it to the top of the gel coat, and then for good measure, covered it all with plastic wrap in hopes it would cure.

Finally, after letting it sit for much of the day so the warmer daytime temperatures and lack of air would give the stuff the best chance possible, it did cure.  Now I had cured, albeit a terribly uneven, coat of gel coat.  After sanding the stuff down to a somewhat more even surface, there are some pretty thin spots but at least the repair is coated.  At some point I will have to readdress this gel coat and make it a better looking repair, but I think I've had enough of gel coat for now.  If/when I do, I think I will use the PVA and not assume that the wax will work. And on the bright side, the color match is much better than many of the prior repairs you can find on the boat.

Fixed, for the most part.

Not being very successful with the gel coat, I turned to another repair...my outboard engine.  Thanks to the previous owner leaving old gas in the motor, it has never run very well.  So, I started looking into what it would take to clean and rebuild the carburetor (the necessary task when you let gasoline sit unused in a carburetor for a long time).  While working with the engine, I noticed that I had failed to reconnect the shift rod when I had replaced the impeller about 6 months ago.

Well, in the 6 months since that repair, the brass nut and steel bar had made an excellent demonstration of dissimilar metal corrosion and had stuck themselves together.  I tried using penetrating oil to work the nut loose, but ended up breaking the shifting rod while trying to get the nut to budge.  Ugh.  I find a parts catalog on the internet and order the replacement bar and nut.  The parts are only $25 so I consider myself lucky that the mistake of not reconnecting the bar wasn't more costly.

Of course, my luck din't last very long.  After the parts arrived, I put the engine up on the cockpit table and begin the "surgery" to replace the rod.  I pull the lower unit, remove the carburetor and finally manage to get the bar free from the other linkage.  But the bar won't come out of its channel along the back edge of the motor leg.  The rod has a bend at the top end and in the engineers apparently thought it would be funny to make the hole the bar passes through just slightly smaller than the bent part of the bar.  The only other way to extract the shift rod is by removing the entire engine (power head) from the cowling and leg assembly and pull the rod out from the top.  Since I don't have much experience with outboard motors, I decide that completely disassembling the motor to remove it was beyond my current capabilities.  I resign myself to taking the motor to a shop so they can replace the rod and I put everything back together to make sure all the parts get to the shop.

That's two failed repairs and one new bit of damage.  Not exactly the direction I want to go.  And it all had me feeling a bit down. I'm feeling better now, and making some progress in the right direction...but the details of that will have to wait for the next post.

Another Impeller!

In my last post I mentioned that I've been focusing my recent attention on my dinghy (a.k.a. family car).  While I work on the registration and debate the best way to fix the leaks in the Caribe RIB, I figured I would look over the motor and see if I can get it running.

The motor is a 15 hp, 2-stroke Yamaha engine.  Using a manual I found online (the previous owner didn't leave me the hard copy), I opened it up and went through all the basic checks to make sure the controls work and it had at least a reasonable potential to start.  While mounted on the storage mount, I hooked up the gas tank and a clamp-on adapter to provide fresh water for cooling.

It took a couple tries, but the motor did fire up.  Of course, the stream of cooling water failed to appear from the appropriate hole in the motor housing where it is supposed to be found.  Since running the engine without cooling water is very bad, I quickly shut down the engine.  With my recent impeller experience, I figure there is a very good chance that this is the problem.  Now, where do they hide the water pump on an outboard motor?

Looking through the manual, I found that the water pump is actually located in the lower end of the motor on the drive shaft.  I guess it makes sense, but it certainly isn't a convenient location for checking the impeller. Guess I will need to disassemble the engine just to check and see if my suspicions are correct.  As I've learned to do, I consult Google and YouTube for additional information on the process and I found this video that demonstrates the general process.



A little more complicated than replacing the impellers on the inboard engines, but it doesn't seem too bad. I locate the impeller (actually a kit, more on that below) at a local store and begin the process of checking and changing the impeller.

Motor on the cockpit table...where else would you work on it?

I remove the lower unit containing the transmission and the water pump housing just like it shows in the video (except I disconnected the transmission linkage before I removed the other bolts).  I disassemble the water pump and viola, the culprit of my lack of cooling water is found.  Another destroyed impeller.  As I've learned, it is very important to locate all the pieces of the impeller and I dig through the passages and am able to find enough rubber bits to account for the entire thing.

Disassembled pump, another destroyed impeller found.

Yamaha did something kind of clever with the pump.  Instead of just providing the impeller, they provide a kit that contains not only the impeller, but also replacement walls for the housing and a few other bits so you can rebuild the water pump and all of the working surfaces are new.  They do this with simple stamped metal parts so the entire kit costs about the same amount as a single impeller for my Westerbeke engines.

New shiny pump walls.

With a refurbished pump, I reassembled the motor.  I did check the lower unit (transmission) oil before reassembly.  With everything back together, I put the motor on the storage mount, hooked everything back up and gave it a try.  As soon as the motor fired, a good stream of water came shooting out of the motor housing just like it was supposed to. Another impeller problem solved.

Of course the engine only ran for a minute or so and then sputtered to a stop.  I probably need to get some fresh gasoline, but at least now I know the motor does run and seems to be in better condition than I suspected might be the case.