The fuel pump was dying – This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. (apologies to Charles Dickens).
OK – that is a bit dramatic but…….. When we got back from Mac Ray I noticed a small pool of oil below the pump in the bilge of the starboard engine. Since the bilge is clean and dry it was quite easy to trace down. A quick dab with the finger and the smell test and I deduced it was gear oil – not crank case oil or ATF. I put a call in to Sean at Rivers Bend Marina. He suggested the fuel pump would need replacing but I should at least top up the gear oil and if I undid the top screw on the side of the housing the pump sits on (he thought there should be a fill and drain screw) then I could add oil. So, armed with newly purchased gear oil and pump I descended into the engine room to do battle. After all, how difficult can it be to add some oil??? Of course it was not that straight forward – what was I thinking – it’s a boat. First off, there was one screw, not two. So back to my trusty on line service manuals and indeed there was a version with the 2 screws and one with a single screw in the side. Back into the engine room I decided to remove the screw and see what happened. As the screw loosened a little bit of the blue/green gear oil ran out followed by a flood of gasoline. Oh, crap, now I have gas everywhere. I put the screw back pronto and set about cleaning up. I was pretty confident that gas should not flow out of there. This can’t be good. I got in touch with JD, our Bridgeview mechanic and he confirmed the pump was gone – likely the seal between the oil chamber and the fuel chamber. So, a new pump was ordered. He also strongly suggested not to run the boat until this was fixed. He located one in Toronto at the Mercruiser parts distributor and we had it installed. Done. Then I thought it best to check the port engine although there was no sign of oil dripping. So once more into the bilge armed with a rag and screwdriver. Once more removing the screw in the reservoir housing and……..once more an oil / gasoline mix. Oh crap – both pumps had gone. Off I went to track down JD and I learn he is on vacation. Hmmmm – that means he will likely have no time get a part and install it before our vacation. Luckily there are 2 mechanical service shops on site. So I tracked down Ron Lake as Bridgeview services. After explaining the situation and convincing him that yes, we needed to order a new pump and no, I don’t think we need to wait for him to get a mechanic onto the boat to verify that, we went through the manual and sorted the pump based on the engine serial numbers and my description of the set-up. Ron thought it an odd arrangement how the pump worked on these engines and vowed to research this with his Mercruiser technician. This was on Saturday July 28th. By Thursday Aug 2nd it was installed. Interesting point – Ron charged $50 less for the pump than JD did……
Interesting little geeky fact here (well, I thought it was interesting anyway but maybe that is the engineer in me). Apparently the 454 blocks (from Chevy) used to be cast with a feature to mount a cam driven fuel pump – all very normal for an overhead valve configuration. Then around 1997 they started supplying the blocks without this feature. Mercruiser had to find a way to mount / actuate the fuel pump. They hit upon the idea of running it off the raw water pump shaft and thus the configuration we have. Then they realized it was prone to having gas leak into the oil reservoir and cause both a fuel pump and water pump bearing failure. The single fill hole design was impossible to drain for maintenance. So they revised the reservoir to have a fill and drain screw (the configuration Sean though we would have). They eventually went to electric fuel pumps which did away with this configuration all together.
OK – there will be a quiz later in the blog so I hope you didn’t doze off.
Anyway, moving on.
I finally got back to work with the blinds in the master cabin. I had gotten started the end of last year but with the move etc the project had languished. So I finally got on with the install. Starting with the port side which is the shorter area, I built a frame to mount the blind to and also the valance to. Once I had this I could get the exact length of the blind and purchase that. These are the same as the ones in the main salon that I went on about several blogs ago last year. Having made the frame I could use the standard blind mounting gear supplied which for once made my life easier. For the valance I purchased some oak which is the same as the rest of the trim wood Sea Ray used (well, it may be ash but they are basically interchangeable with the grain type). I stained it with my much loved gel stain and varnished it and presto – it perfectly matched the rest of the cabin trim. If I say so myself I think the effect works nice and really updates the cabin.
Before picture of our cabin
Withe the new blinds and valance in place
Blinds closed - it helps with light coming in at night from the big street lights visible right through the port side.
