Friday, May 4, 2012

Repower

Allright, this is one of those posts about how the romance of sailing dies the moment you buy an actual boat.  

You've been warned.


This is our engine.  There are two things to know about it.  First, it's an English engine (a Perkins 4108, to be precise).  Because it is English, it leaks oil.  All Perkins 4108s leak oil.  So do Triumph motorcycle engines.  As near as I can tell, English engines just leak oil.  (My friend Reinhard can correct me if I am wrong.)

Lately the leak has gotten much worse - nearly a liter of oil every 12 hours.  I had a well-recommended mechanic in yesterday to take a look at replacing the seals.  And, bad news - to replace the rear seals, you have to take the damn engine off its mounts and shift it forward for access.  Which means the mechanic figured it at a three-day job.  Which, with the injector pump rebuild that we also need, puts us about four thousand dollars out of pocket.

The second salient fact is that this engine is much smaller than is typical for a boat our size.  Perkins very optimistically calls this a 50 HP engine.  General agreement has it closer to 35.  We displace 18 metric tons, mebbe 19 when we're heavily loaded.

So, we knew the engine was undersized when we bought the boat, and we always figured we might end up putting in a new engine ("repowering") if we were going to go to Patagonia or somewhere silly like that.

Repowering was always a hypothetical, "maybe someday" sort of thing.  But the work our current engine needs is suddenly adding up to a quarter of the price of a repower.  It clearly makes no sense to put so much money into our current engine if we're just going to get rid of it in a couple years.  

But, lord have mercy, all this sailing the world stuff is really just an extended lark.  We're trying to keep things fun, and dropping $20k, in Australian dollars no less, just doesn't sound like fun.

Stay tuned...

8 comments:

  1. Hi
    I have a 4108 in my 25,000lb 1966 Cal 48 which was having the same problems. I chose to recon the motor for $6k instead of spending the $20k to replace. It runs great but the Peripheral parts like the heat exchanger, fuel lift pump and the injector pump went next. Total spent ended up about $8k and runs fine but missing the extra horsepower (and fuel consumption) that a new Yanmar would have. The Perkins is a great motor which is easy to work on and lasts forever but!!!!
    Good luck
    Mark
    Cal 48 Wainui

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    1. thanks for that, Mark - you highlight a big consideration, which is that there's no guarantee of course that spending on the Perkins would end just because we tackled the problems that are apparent now...

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    2. oh, yes, and our 45-footer weighed in at 40,000 pounds with a half load the two times we hauled her with a travel lift... so that's one indication of how nice a larger engine might be...

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  2. We have a late-eighties Yanmar (4JH-TE). It is 55hp, has nearly 3K hours on it, and is turbocharged. It doesn't leak anything and runs super smooth and quiet, averaging between 3/4 to one gallon per hour. We just replaced our injectors. Interesting to note that 3 of the 4 were really bad before replacement, yet the engine had still started on a dime, everytime--so I reason the compression is still good. Now it still does, but runs better too at the higher RPMs. Especially after spending $400 to rebuild the turbocharger recently, I would prefer not to have an engine with a turbocharger and the added complexity, but I don't know if that is possible these days. Anyway, this is my long-winded endorsement of a Yanmar. Good luck to you guys, sorry you have to deal with this. I recall Terry Kotas wrote an article called Repowering in Paradise that has a lot of good info in it, making templates, approaching the project, etc. It was in the October 2009 issue of Blue Water Sailing, but I couldn't find it online.

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    1. Hey Michael - Yep, we had the non-turbocharged 4JH in Pelagic, and I am also a huge fan of Yanmars. I would also avoid a turbocharger if I could, but it looks like turbocharged engines are the only way to get the power we want with an engine that is small enough to reasonably get down the companionway steps, along the passageway and through the engine room door. (Oh, the joys!) We'll see what develops...

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  3. I'm happy to confirm that all English engines leak oil... boat engines, motorcycle engines, car engines, aeroplane engines... it's a kind of tradition.

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    1. yeah, I thought that was the case. As a nation, you all are admirably at ease with the situation...

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  4. Great Post About Emergency MELTDOWN Generators Shutdown and Perkins engines parts.

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