Tuesday 24 August 2010

Another interesting Service

Whilst away in York, the engine hours turned 500, signifying time for a major service.

Now the OH has done the rest of the service parts but had never tackled the belts. Four of them intertwined for added difficulty in changing. As it happens the service went smoothly and was completed in 3 hours. Not too bad.

Now we turned our attention to the props. These had been on since we relaunched the boat in February, so for us having completed 200 hours they were doing well. They were not however perfect so with next weekends jaunt to Wells on the cards we decided to change them for our spare refurbed set. This we can normally do from our home berth whilst the boat is afloat but this time we ran into a spot of bother. The prop nut in the rear cone had tightened up to silly proportions. No amount of tugging onit would make the bugger come free.

So we took the desicion to beach her in the slipway. We moored her on the slipway mooring then lifted the drive and firmy dragged her back as far as we could.The OH then took a quick paddle and with some more force on the nut managed to free the props. The ducks were a great help as were the fish that kept coming to take a look at what we were doing. Beaching her gave us a good oppurtunity to scrub the outdrive and trim tabs and rams though. The props once removed were not as bad as expected. The 4 blade prop being nigh on perfect and the 3 bladed prop having the ends bent over in a similar fashion on all 3 blades hence the lack of vibrations.

Once sorted out the only thing left to do was take her for a test run. In the end we only made it to Saxilby for lunch before turning around and meeting Steve and Chris in the Pyewipe Inn for teh second time in two days!!

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