Yes, it has been a year since Gypsy was hauled out of the water and put on a truck to start her spa treatment. We have been working away at a frantic pace ever since. The holidays and the cold have slowed us down, but we are still plugging away. A week ago we added a coat of epoxy filler to fair the joints in the pantry. It took having the space heater next to the area to get the epoxy to cure a day later. We did the lids for the port settee in the garage last weekend the same way.
Bill decided it is too much bother to do epoxy in the cold, so decided to work on the engine instead. We have had a number of deferred maintenance projects on the engine that have been postponed due to other projects. This is a good time to address them since we can’t do much else and they need to get done. Bill read the Yanmar shop manual and got out the wrenches.
The engine is 18 years old and a number of things are due for inspection or refurbishing. We only got to two things last year while the engine was out of Gypsy in Tom’s shop. We installed new engine mounts from PYI. Tom also made a new mount for our Balmar alternator.
Here is a list of what still needs to get done:
Starter motor rebuild: this is a bit of preventative maintenance.
Fuel injector rebuild. Yanmar suggests rebuilding at 1000 hours. Ours have about 1200 hours on them. We took them to Pacific Fuel Injection in Portland and they said that the injectors were well below spec. The moral is that deferring injector service is not doing your engine any favors.
Heat exchanger inspection. On our last trip north we discovered that the front cover for the heat exchanger was leaking. We had this neat salt stalactite on our engine so we used permatex to seal things up. Once we were home, we would take care of it. Well, a number of years have passed and it is finally time. The good news is since Gypsy spends her time in fresh water her cooling system is not all corroded. New gaskets and seals are coming from Cook Engine.
The exhaust elbow was also pulled to see if it was corroded or plugged up with carbon. It is in pretty good shape so it goes back on with a new gasket.
While the engine is torn apart we are going to replace all of the hoses. They are also on order.
Our Yanmar has been very reliable and a bit of service is a small price to pay to keep it working.
Meanwhile, Nina has been working on more insulation patterns and cutting out the pieces.
GypsyKramer 