April 8th 2019
This morning the diesel heater started without complaints, so it probably was due to the heat in the engine compartment that it wouldn’t start yesterday.
Despite gloomy forecasts the day turned out to be nice and warm again. The morning was quite relaxed, and we had a superb lunch of confit de canard in the cockpit. After lunch the mechanic found the time to service our engine and turned it into a crash course in Diesel engines. Since we are complete novices and want to prevent another ‘eventful day’ on the water we paid close attention to what he explained.
We learned to change the oil and oil filter, how to change the fuel filters, how to clean the air filters if necessary and the correct way to measure the oil level. We also learned that we shouldn’t have waited much longer with servicing the engine; there was a big tear in the impeller and there was almost no oil left in the transmission. The malfunction yesterday was indeed caused by a rusty contact, so he changed that as well. Later on he took us to the workshop where he explained everything we couldn’t see properly when he was working on our engine with a demo model. We’re really grateful for this crash course, it helped a lot. Especially because the engine in our boat is so boxed in that with some of the jobs you can’t see what you’re doing, and you have to rely on touch.
He also explained how we could start our engine manually if we were in dire need. Our boat came with a hand crank. We have tried it, we turned the crank until our arms fell off, but nothing happened. So we de-rusted it, painted it again and stacked it neatly far far away.
The trick is to open the levers for the compression chambers, so that there’s no compression. Then you start swiveling, and once you have gained momentum you quickly close the levers and -hopefully- you’ll get a spark. In theory that is.
Our mechanic also discovered that the Morse cable , the remote control cable for the transmission, was almost worn through. Something that needed immediate replacement. He didn’t have time this week to do it, not because it’s a difficult job, only a very fiddly one. So he thought that we might be capable of replacing it ourselves, and he would come and check later in the week if we had done it correctly.
No time to relax anymore, how to get the freakin’ thing loose?