Metal in fuel

[Steven F]

I’m looking for some advice with a problem I’m having with my yanmars. I have a 2001 32 albemarle with twin yanmar 6lya-ste with approximately 1350 hours. For filtration each engine has a racor 900 with 10 micron filters and then the on engine yanmar filter which Im unsure of the micron rating. <br /><br />Over the summer I thought I may have gotten a tank of dirty fuel from one the marinas I travel to. The racors which normally last all year were clogged up within a month. I changed all the filters around September and ran the boat several hundred more miles the rest of the season without issue. <br /><br />This winter since I had the fuel issue I decided to remove both racors, take them home, clean the bowls out and rebuild. When I dumped the filters into a clean 5 gallon bucket I noticed a lot of metal. Some smaller glitter but some very large pieces as well. I ran a magnet over it and figured out almost all of it was nonferrous. <br /><br />The boat ran flawlessly up until it was hauled in November. Full wot rpm verified with a photo tach.  My question is do you guys think this is an injector pump coming apart and contaminating the fuel or did it come from an outside source like a filling station pump.  I’ve attached a few pictures of the debris that came out of the racor bowls. The picture in the clear home made drain pan was actually fuel that I blew out of the port side engine return line. There was some silty/metallic material within that I could not positively identify. <br /><br />thanks for any input,

Steve 

 

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[donald roth]

Metal in the return lines are probably debris that were in the lines when the system was installed.  If the HP pump was spitting metal, there would be other obvious symptoms.  If the debris were coming from the tanks, your filtration system has failed miserably, but those debris couldn’t pass through the pump without causing damages anyway.

 

[Steven F]

Unfortunately the boat is winterized and I can’t start the engines until around April. I was hoping to get a jumpstart on the problem before the season got going. <br />Thanks 

[Shannon Ritzert]

This is interesting.  That almost looks like melted aluminum to me.  I wouldn’t think anything that large would run through the return lines.  Could you run your return line into a remote tank, then inspect the diesel in said tank for metal fragments?

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