A small problem noted in a survey a while back has become a large problem through sheer stupidity and ignorance on my part. It was noted when we bought Evenstar that the “Raw Water Pump” was leaking and needed placement or repair. This is something with a lesser capacity for denial would have dealt with immediately; someone like me who recognizes that spewing sea water all over your engine room is an intrinsicly stupid thing to do is still capable of procrastinating long enough to destroy a brand new high output alternator and make a big mess of things.
/* Landlubber mot d’explanation time */
Raw Water Pump – boats like Evenstar use seawater to help cool the engine. While we don’t actually pump sea water through the engine, we do use the sea water (or “Raw Water”) to cool off the engine coolant which then cools the engine much like the coolant system in your car. Only with a boat engine instead of a radiator to cool the coolant you run sea water through a heat exchanger instead. Unlike the front end of your car there’s not a lot of cool breeze in the bowels of the engine room. Inside the pump is a little “impeller” used to suck the water in and push it through the boat; this is made of rubber and wears out from time to time.
/* End of landlubber moment */
Gnawing a hole in the back of my mind since almost day one has been this pump. It’s a fairly simple thing really, and I ordered a replacement some time ago. Easy to order, you call the Volvo parts guy and say “May I have a raw water pump for a Volvo Penta TAMD41 B engine please.” They order it, you fork over around $400 and Bob’s yer uncle Fanny’s yer aunt you have a new pump.
They you look at it, and stare at it. You realize it’s shiny bronze, not Volvo green and you’re going to have to paint it. After you install it. Then you realize every time you open the old pump to change the impeller, an apparently infinite amount of water gushes into the boat. You realize that if you take the pump out when the boat is in the water MANY gallons of water will come in the boat while you futz around dropping screws and O-rings into the bilge trying to put it back on. So you say “it’s OK, it’s be fine until the end of the season.” Or “I’ll get to it in the spring.
Of course sea water is not unlike a mild acid in terms of how it interacts with metal. And electrical things like alternators, well they REALLY don’t like it. So the new high output 24V alternator I paid a lot of money to put in last spring seems to have suffered terminally from my caution. So now it’s critical, because that alternator needs to be replaced and these are items not normally viewed as “disposable”.
Last week, emboldened by my classes in Diesel mechanics and some success taking things apart in the lab I figured it was finally time to replace the pump. I undid the hoses and watched the water gush in. Then, looking at the new pump in one and the old one still attached to the engine I saw that they were not the same.
That’s right folks, the pump is wrong. Not according to the parts book though – the pump in hand is the correct raw water pump for a TAMD41-B engine. It just looks different, and has no extrusions to actually attach the hoses to.
Further research shows that THIS pump expects some sort of adapter things. So I order them. $58.00 later I am the proud owner of five O-Rings, two plastic clips and two small bolts. The total mass of this including the bolts can not be more than two ounces of material. What seems to be missing though is the “adapter” I thought I was ordering in order to get the hoses onto the pump. Turns out there isn’t one…THIS pump expects pipes, not hoses. So it’s pretty useless to me without re-plumbing the engine or cutting segments of my hose and installing pipes. If one of these fittings goes I have a one inch hose in my engine room quietly siphoning seawater in to the boat at an alarming rate. This could easily sink the boat every quickly, so I can not mess around here.
So it’s back to square one, with a a $400 bronze paperweight and some really expensive rubber bands.
