Engine removal - Finding out I'm not quite as 'man' as I previously thought!

It was finally time to do the big job that we had been putting off until we got some nice weather. Strange that we chose to do it on a rainy day then, but at least I had a 37% effective cover to keep putting on the boat during the spells of downpour.

We collected the boat from my Nanna's drive in the morning, and towed it back to my Dad's drive and garage. We thought this would be a good opportunity to finally see the engine running and pumping water, so we connected the hose up to it, connected the battery, turned the key, and...Nothing. I figured the best way to approach this would be to go and make a pot of tea, and let Dad have a look for the problem! Eventually he found a frayed wire going into the solenoid, and upon replacing this, the engine started.

However, it seemed to run extremely lumpy, and coughed and spluttered quite a lot. This wasn't how it ran a few weeks ago! After making another pot of tea, Dad discovered a bad connection into one of the spark plugs - the engine had been misfiring. All this really needed was a trim at the end and a bit of a clean up.

We then broke some kind of seal/o-ring on the hydraulic cylinder using for titling the engine (turning a screw in it allows the fluid to flow so the engine can be moved by hand). This then proceeded to leak hydraulic fluid all over us. It looked nice though, sort of like red wine.

The prop was then removed as it had began making a slightly uneasy noise as it span. This turned out to be grainy grease and dirt around the rim of the prop. Probably due to the fact that it is also the engine's exhaust. We cleaned it up, but I'm guessing it's just going to get the same again until it's had some decent usage and a good blast out.

Right, 2 hours work done, and the boat was at the stage I assumed it was at when I picked it up in the morning, minus one gasket and some hydraulic fluid. Time for lunch!

Now to remove the engine. As expected, this was bolted on with lovely steel nuts and bolts which, whilst probably all looked nice and shiny a couple of years ago, were now rusted firmly in place. Six of them altogether. However, rather surprisingly, the top 4 weren't too difficult to remove. The bottom two posed more of a problem. Especially as the bolts used were about 6 inches long, and the only thing small enough to get at them with was a pathetic little spanner. Still, with a little gentle persuasion, they came off. Obviously, in keeping with the spirit of the boat, there was a piece of rotted, non-water-resistant wood also held on by these bolts, which came off too.

The engine was now just held on by two brackets at the top, and bonded (with another piece of rotted wood) to the outside of the boat with a white resin stuff.

Dad said that two people could lift his old Mercury 50hp engine. So we figured we could lift this...My god! How this is ridiculously heavy!!!!!!! After 10 minutes of struggling, we managed to lift it off the boat (rotted wood attached), and lay it on the floor. I've got a funny feeling it might be staying there forever!



It didn't take long to sort out the problem with the trim/tilt system - from removing the engine it was now clear that a wire going into the motor was a bit dead. This was fixed, and the trim/tilt mechanism worked fine. Well, as fine as it could with half of it's hydraulic fluid missing. Fantastic.

So all in all we achieved what we had set out to do today, which was remove the engine and fix the trim/tilt. We just had a bit more fun along the way!

One more thing worth mentioning is that, upon removal of the engine, the transom had quite a few cracks along the top. It feels solid enough inside, but it is slightly worrying. Maybe this engine is slightly over sized for this boat? We're currently weighing up our options with this. Is it worth putting some extra work in to further strengthen it? Hmmm...