Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

Re: Good on you Steve / Great😉 We had
In Response To: Good on you Steve ()

some trouble with the engine which took me a week to figure out but we are back in business now. Five days in the hole. I'm so beat up, scratched and bruised that I look like I was in a car wreak. A couple of months ago the boat started heating up and I chased my tail for almost a week. I finely nerrowed it down to the heat exchanger. The weld inside that separates the two sides had failed internally. I replaced the heat exchanger but while doing the work I decided to double the oil cooler capacity by putting in service the half that wasn't being used. It only took a 6 inch rubber hose and a couple of fittings. More oil cooling is better, right? Not so much... Two months of short sails and motoring around San Diego bay never showed up a heating problem until we took off for Santa Cruz island. An hour into the trip the engine heated up. We sailed back into the bay and spent the next week trying to find out what had gone wrong. After chasing my tail I figured out that the water was actually spending too much time in the oil cooler and getting to hot prior to entering the block. I had built myself a heating issue by fixing something that wasn't broken. I found it by taking a thermal gun and taking readings all over the engine. The oil coming out of the oil cooler was 165 degrees. That left only a 20 degrees rise to normal operating tempature. Not enough cooling left in the cooling. I removed my 6 inch rubber hose and returned everything to normal and we are back heading north. 😎 So, the takeaway from this is "more is not always better and don't fix what isn't broke"!

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