Easy gone bad
18 December 2012 | Staniel Cay, Bahamas
Clear sunny and 77 degrees
I try hard to keep a clean engine room. Well, today a very basic task that takes about 30 minutes, morphed into a two hour clean up job. All you have to do is unscrew the oil filter, which is located at a remote location and is very easy to get a gallon zip lock bag under the filter. Any untrained monkey could get this one right. You just unscrew the filter and let it fall into the bag. Right? Yeah right. The slippery little oil bomb managed to start to get away so with a lightening fast grabbing motion on my part I managed to hit it and send it pin balling all over the engine room finally landing upside down and draining what’s left all over the bottom of the bilge. So, you’re thinking, what’s the big deal? Just clean it up. Well, you have to be a triple jointed Zen yoga master with iron skin to get under the engine without coming away with sore joints and bleeding arms.
The picture is of the shaft coupler and all its voids. After the clean up job, which I thought a success, I covered the engine and called it a day. The next day we motored for an hour to a new anchorage. Upon returning to the oil filter bombsite, for a final inspection, I was rewarded with yet another clean up job. You see the oil that was trapped in all the coupler openings left from the centrifugal force of the shaft spinning at 2500 rpm’s…Freaking oil everywhere. Welcome to my world.
Good Trade