Repowering your Boat

We came across this article written by JACK HARDEN and feel it’s worth a read… ENJOY!

Mechanical engines, due to the nature of the mechanical, non-isochronous governors, must be propped solely on the attainable engine speed at full throttle, steady state conditions. Unlike electronic engines governors which have a precise, predetermined, and consistent governor set point; mechanical engines … Read More

Introduction Replacing a propeller shaft, shaft log, strut, or rudder, one at a time is a fairly straight forward job as you have a “given” as to exactly where one of these pieces is supposed to end up and probably … Read More

Strut With our rudder log/lower bearing in place, we can now use our “dummy” shaft to reconfirm clearances, angles, etc., before moving on to our next step-the strut. After the dummy shaft is close to EXACTLY where it needs to … Read More

To answer a common question that seems to pop up quite often and without getting too technical, you’ll find that the thin nut is supposed to go on first and torqued to something less than full spec. The BIG nut … Read More

If you go back about 30 years, there was a very popular product on the market called “Sealoy” that became the alloy of choice for propeller shafting (kind of like “Kleenex”). Armco Corp. bought the trade name and rights to … Read More

“A Different Perspective” A very important question and I typically go about answering these types of questions very differently than everyone else. Why? Because I’ve “been there and done that” for 25+ years on 100’s of different types of boats … Read More

The two below images have the extending hookup at about a 2′ o-clock angle on your heat-exchanger for easy routing of a hose to your shaft packings.

I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to build HYDRAULIC DRIVES for two sailboats in the last 10 years and both were quite fun projects. One was an 18 HP system on a small sailboat (Yanmar 2GM … Read More

Ever really wonder what shaft packings are all about? What do they do, how do they work, how are  they are made and whether there may be a better “mouse trap” out there that will do the job of keeping … Read More